Summary: A recent study shows that eye movements reveal memory traces even when people say they do not remember. Participants rewatched short animation clips with surprising events, and their gaze naturally shifted toward the location where the surprise would occur—evidence that the moment was stored in memory despite a lack of verbal acknowledgment.
This nonverbal measure of memory frequently outperformed traditional verbal reports and suggests a practical way to assess memory in populations who cannot provide reliable spoken responses—such as infants, non-verbal patients, individuals with neurological damage, or animals.
Key Facts
- Memory Without Words: Anticipatory eye movements can expose memories even when people deny remembering.
- Study Evidence: Gaze direction predicted the timing and location of surprising events in videos and often surpassed verbal recall in accuracy.
- Clinical Potential: The approach could help evaluate memory in infants, Alzheimer’s patients, and people with brain injuries whose speech is impaired.
Source: Tel Aviv University
Researchers from Tel Aviv University and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov) measured memory by tracking eye movements while participants viewed animation videos—without directly asking if they remembered.
The research demonstrates that people often retain more information than they can or will report verbally. By monitoring where viewers looked during repeat viewings of short animated sequences, the team identified reliable memory signals in anticipatory gaze patterns. Because the method requires only natural viewing behavior, it is suitable for testing memory in subjects who cannot answer questions, including infants, nonverbal patients, and certain animal models.
The project was led by Dr. Flavio Jean Schmidig, Daniel Yamin, Dr. Omer Sharon, and Prof. Yuval Nir, with collaborators from the Sagol School of Neuroscience, the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, and the Sagol Brain Institute at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov). The paper appears in Communications Psychology.
How the study worked
A total of 145 healthy participants watched specially made animated clips containing a salient, surprising event—for example, an object or creature suddenly appearing from off-screen. Participants viewed each clip twice while their eye movements were recorded. During the second viewing, many viewers shifted their gaze toward the screen area where the surprising event would appear just before it happened.
When researchers compared these anticipatory gaze patterns with participants’ verbal memory reports, they found that gaze was often the more sensitive indicator of prior exposure. In some instances, participants denied remembering the event, yet their eyes anticipated it. These findings indicate that memory retrieval can occur without accurate or confident verbal reporting.
Interpreting anticipatory gaze
“Traditional memory tests typically rely on direct questioning: did you see this before?” says Dr. Flavio Schmidig. “But many populations cannot answer such questions reliably. Tracking natural gaze behavior offers an alternative that taps into memory without requiring verbal reports.”
Daniel Yamin adds that anticipatory gaze acts as a fine-grained measure: small shifts in where a person looks can reveal lingering associative memories that simple yes/no questions miss. Using machine learning, the team showed that a classifier trained on a few seconds of gaze data can predict whether a person had previously seen a clip, providing an automated, scalable way to infer memory from eye movements.
Dr. Omer Sharon explains that verbal answers compress memory into coarse categories—yes, no, unsure—whereas gaze behavior captures nuanced, moment-to-moment expectations. “When someone glances to the left because they vaguely anticipate something happening there, that movement contains information about the presence of memory,” he says.
Clinical and research applications
Prof. Yuval Nir emphasizes the method’s potential for clinical and developmental settings. Because gaze can be detected using common cameras on laptops or smartphones, the technique does not require expensive or elaborate equipment. It could enable remote or bedside memory assessments and extend research to populations that have been difficult to study with traditional verbal memory tests.
The study also distinguishes memory components: anticipatory gaze tracked associative recollection about specific events, while changes in pupil size correlated more with familiarity. The researchers further demonstrated that anticipatory gaze can reveal the beneficial effects of sleep on memory retrieval without relying on verbal reports, underlining the method’s versatility across cognitive science and clinical research.
About this memory and eye tracking research news
Author: Noga Shahar
Source: Tel Aviv University
Contact: Noga Shahar – Tel Aviv University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Anticipatory eye gaze as a marker of memory” by Flavio Jean Schmidig et al., Communications Psychology
Abstract
Anticipatory eye gaze as a marker of memory
Memory research typically relies on verbal report, which conflates the presence of a memory with the ability to report it. This study introduces the MEGA (Memory Episode Gaze Anticipation) paradigm and demonstrates that anticipatory gaze patterns, measured with eye tracking, can quantify memory retrieval without requiring verbal responses.
Across five experiments with 145 participants using both custom animations and naturalistic movie clips, accumulated gaze proximity to salient events reliably indexed memory traces seconds before the events appeared on screen. Machine learning classifiers were able to detect whether a single viewing reflected prior memory based on short segments of gaze data. Comparative analyses indicate that anticipatory gaze reflects associative recollection, while pupil dilation aligns more with familiarity. The method also detected sleep-related memory benefits, illustrating broad applicability for cognitive and clinical research where verbal reporting is limited or unavailable.