Eye movements reveal an impairing role of context reinstatement in temporal memory retrieval

Mentally reactivating contextual details from the past often supports episodic memory retrieval. However, these benefits may depend on whether reinstated details align with the actual goal of retrieval, such as "when" an event occurred versus other contextual features. In this eye-tracking study, we tested whether auditory cues during sequence encoding are reflected in gaze behavior, and whether evidence of gaze-related context reinstatement relates to better or worse temporal order memory. Participants viewed sequences of centrally presented objects while listening to tones played in their left or right ear. These lateralized sounds served to group subsets of items into left- or right-sided events, establishing a non-visual spatial structure during encoding. At test, participants were shown pairs of objects from the same auditory event side-by-side and had to choose which object appeared later in the sequence. Three gaze measures were computed: 1) audio-spatial context bias during sequence encoding, indexed by greater dwell bias toward the tone side during pre-item fixation; 2) context reinstatement bias at retrieval, indexed by greater dwell bias toward the item congruent with the original context side; and 3) memory strength, indexed by greater dwell bias toward the correct object choice at retrieval. We found that greater gaze bias toward the context-congruent side predicted poorer temporal order memory. Further, this impairing effect of reinstatement was amplified when audio-spatial context bias was weak and memory signals were stronger. These findings suggest that reactivation of retrieval-irrelevant event details, especially when weakly encoded, creates interference that disrupts episodic memory.