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Contributed Talk Session: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Skirball Theater
Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Looking at nothing during deliberation reflects optimal sampling from episodic memory

Jonathan Nicholas¹, Sixing Chen¹, Marcelo G Mattar¹; ¹New York University

Presenter: Jonathan Nicholas

Episodic memory supports deliberation by allowing our choices to be guided by past experiences, yet the dynamics of retrieval during decision making remain poorly understood. Here, we address this gap by using eye tracking to trace episodic retrieval during value-based choice. In the absence of visual information, participants directed their gaze toward the encoding locations of retrieved episodes, and these fixation patterns aligned with their decisions. We further formalized optimal retrieval in this setting and found that people's fixations are consistent with optimal sampling from episodic memory. These results demonstrate that eye gaze can serve as a window into episodic sampling and suggest that people optimally retrieve episodes to guide their choices.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures