Working memory is thought to be divided into distinct visual and verbal subsystems. Studies of visual working memory frequently use verbal working memory tasks as control conditions and/or use articulatory suppression to ensure that visual load is not transferred to verbal working memory. Using these verbal tasks relies on the assumption that the verbal working memory load will not interfere with the same processes as visual working memory. In the present study, participants maintained a visual or verbal working memory load as they simultaneously viewed scenes while their eye movements were recorded. Because eye movements and visual working memory are closely linked, we anticipated the visual load would interfere with scene-viewing (and vice versa), while the verbal load would not. Surprisingly, both visual and verbal memory loads interfered with scene-viewing behavior, while eye movements during scene-viewing did not significantly interfere with performance on either memory task. These results suggest that a verbal working memory load can interfere with eye movements in a visual task.

When viewing scenes, observers differ in how long they linger at each fixation location and how far they move their eyes between fixations. What factors drive these differences in eye-movement behaviors? Previous work suggests individual differences in working memory capacity may influence fixation durations and saccade amplitudes. In the present study, participants (N = 98) performed two scene-viewing tasks, aesthetic judgment and memorization, while viewing 100 photographs of real-world scenes. Working memory capacity, working memory processing ability, and fluid intelligence were assessed with an operation span task, a memory updating task, and Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices, respectively. Across participants, we found significant effects of task on both fixation durations and saccade amplitudes. At the level of each individual participant, we also found a significant relationship between memory updating task performance and participants fixation duration distributions. However, we found no effect of fluid intelligence and no effect of working memory capacity on fixation duration or saccade amplitude distributions, inconsistent with previous findings. These results suggest that the ability to flexibly maintain and update working memory is strongly related to fixation duration behavior.

How do spatial constraints and meaningful scene regions interact to control overt attention during visual search for objects in real-world scenes? To answer this question, we combined novel surface maps of the likely locations of target objects with maps of the spatial distribution of scene semantic content. The surface maps captured likely target surfaces as continuous probabilities. Meaning was represented by meaning maps highlighting the distribution of semantic content in local scene regions. Attention was indexed by eye movements during the search for target objects that varied in the likelihood they would appear on specific surfaces. The interaction between surface maps and meaning maps was analyzed to test whether fixations were directed to meaningful scene regions on target-related surfaces. Overall, meaningful scene regions were more likely to be fixated if they appeared on target-related surfaces than if they appeared on target-unrelated surfaces. These findings suggest that the visual system prioritizes meaningful scene regions on target-related surfaces during visual search in scenes.

The present study examines eye movement behavior in real-world scenes with a large (N = 100) sample. We report baseline measures of eye movement behavior in our sample, including mean fixation duration, saccade amplitude, and initial saccade latency. We also characterize how eye movement behaviors change over the course of a 12 s trial. These baseline measures will be of use to future work studying eye movement behavior in scenes in a variety of literatures. We also examine effects of viewing task on when and where the eyes move in real-world scenes: participants engaged in a memorization and an aesthetic judgment task while viewing 100 scenes. While we find no difference at the mean-level between the two tasks, temporal- and distribution-level analyses reveal significant task-driven differences in eye movement behavior.