Gaze Restriction and Reactivation of Place-bound Content Drive Eye Movements During Mental Imagery.

When we imagine a picture, we move our eyes even though the picture is physically not present. These eye movements provide information about the ongoing process of mental imagery. Eye movements unfold over time, and previous research has shown that the temporal gaze dynamics of eye movements in mental imagery have unique properties, which are unrelated to those in perception.

Eye movements during visual imagery and perception show spatial correspondence but have unique temporal signatures.

Eye fixation patterns during mental imagery are similar to those during perception of the same picture, suggesting that oculomotor mechanisms play a role in mental imagery (i.e., the "looking at nothing" effect).

Recurrence quantification analysis of eye movements during mental imagery.

Several studies demonstrated similarities of eye fixations during mental imagery and visual perception but-to our knowledge-the temporal characteristics of eye movements during imagery have not yet been considered in detail. To fill this gap, the same data is analyzed with conventional spatial techniques such as analysis of areas of interest (AOI), ScanMatch, and MultiMatch and with recurrence quantification analysis (RQA), a new way of analyzing gaze data by tracking re-fixations and their temporal dynamics. Participants viewed and afterwards imagined three different kinds of pictures (art, faces, and landscapes) while their eye movements were recorded.