Influence of Spatiotemporal Stimulus Structure on Memory-Guided Saccade Sequences

Saccades - rapid eye movements that place targets of interest on the fovea - are used to measure cognitive processes such as visual working memory. The goal of this study was to identify the influence of spatiotemporal structure, set size, and order of presentation on performance in memory-guided saccade sequences. Fourteen participants were presented with visual stimuli that differed in spatiotemporal structure (Sequential, Spatial, or Random) and set size (3-6) which they had to reproduce with sequential saccades. Results were analyzed with respect to % correct target recall, absolute error, and relative error. There was a significant influence of structure on errors (random>spatial > sequential), set size on correct recall and errors, primacy on correct recall, and interaction effects. These results indicate that spatiotemporal structure is beneficial for memory chunking in saccade sequence planning, however, this has complex interactions with set size, order, and the way saccade errors are measured.