SERVAIS Anaïs (CRC): "Study of gaze aversion as a marker of the attentional switch from the outside world to memory"

Monday 28 Apr 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

Abstract: Attention can be either directed to the external world—for example, while reading this abstract (external attention)—or to the internal mental world containing memories and thoughts (internal attention). Internal attention is involved in various cognitive tasks such as memory retrieval and mind-wandering among others. Since attentional resources are limited, the two forms of attention compete and attention must switch from one world to the other a considerable number of times per day. An attentional switch towards the internal world is accompanied by a disengagement from the external world—a phenomenon known as perceptual decoupling. There has been a growing desire to discover an objective behavioral or physiological marker that can help detect the attentional switch. Such a marker would be useful in various domains, for instance being able to monitor attention in tasks where it needs to be maintained towards the external world. Eye movements, as indicators of the direction of attention, seem to be promising candidates: internal attention is associated with ocular behaviors that reduce the processing of visual information, in particular gaze aversion.

To investigate this issue, we believe that it is important to consider this phenomenon at lying at the interface between multiple domains: attention, autobiographical memory, mindwandering, and eye movements. The convergence of the different domains allowed for a proposal of a new hypothetical framework suggesting gaze aversion—the direction of the gaze to a neutral space during memory recall—as a behavioral marker of the attentional switch for detection at a single-trial level. Although common and widespread, this behavior has rarely been studied scientifically. Thus, we first conducted a study based on two online experiments (n = 160) which showed that the direction of the gaze, when averted, is used as a social cue to distinguish the states of internal and external attention. We followed up with a second behavioral study, where eye movements were recorded during autobiographical memory retrieval (n = 32). First, the results supported a relationship between gaze aversion and the attentional switch. Second, since the detection of the attentional switch would require a fine definition of eye markers, the study also characterizes gaze aversion which: lasts an average of 6 sec, is not accompanied by head movement, and occurs in various directions. This characterization however remains incomplete due to technical constraints. Since no eye-tracker is designed to specifically measure gaze aversion, we also tested other recording methods in our third preliminary study (n = 4), which suggested the potential of electrooculography. Finally, to promote the study of the attentional switch in aeronautics, a fourth pilot study (n = 16), inspired by the literature on involuntary autobiographical memories, proposes a protocol during which memory cues are presented during an air traffic control simulation task to induce memories. Given the similarities between autobiographical retrieval and mindwandering, we consider that this could be an appropriate approach to indirectly study mindwandering episodes while avoiding the biases of self-report methods. This study also made it possible to observe gaze aversions in a simulation environment, a promising milestone encouraging its utility in an ecological setting.

 

Biosketch: I completed my master's in Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Liège before going to Toulouse Paul Sabatier University (Université Paul Sabatier III) to pursue my PhD. During my PhD, I investigated eye movements during memory retrieval, focusing on gaze aversion as a potential marker of the attentional shift from the outside world toward memory. My PhD research was conducted in collaboration with two labs: the Brain and Cognition Research Center (CerCo) and the National School of Civil Aviation (ENAC). Now, I am back in Liège, working as a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC with Dr. Christine Bastin. My current goal is to investigate the relationships between novelty processing and episodic memory using a neuropsychological approach.

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