Gaze Reinstatement

Gaze reinstatement is the cognitive phenomenon in which a person mentally recalling or imagining a previously seen scene reproduces, on a blank or unrelated surface, eye movement patterns similar to those made when the scene was first viewed. The effect was demonstrated through the "look-at-nothing" paradigm, where participants asked questions about a memorized image continue to fixate the blank locations where the relevant content used to be. Reinstated gaze is typically sparse and spatially distorted relative to encoding gaze, but it carries enough structural information to support memory retrieval. The phenomenon is the basis for an emerging class of gaze-driven memory and retrieval interfaces that allow people to search visual memories without speech or text input, which is particularly relevant for users with speech, language, or motor impairments.