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Peer-reviewedCC BYNature Neuroscience

Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand

  • Philip Sulewski1,2
  • Carmen Amme3
  • Martin N. Hebart4,5,6
  • Peter König B7,3
  • Tim Christian Kietzmann8
8 affiliations
  1. 1Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany. [email protected]
  2. 2Vision and Computational Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. [email protected]
  3. 3Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany
  4. 4Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior, Universities of Marburg, Giessen and Darmstadt, Marburg, Germany
  5. 5Department of Medicine, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany
  6. 6Vision and Computational Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
  7. 7Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, Center of Experimental Medicine, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany
  8. 8Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany. [email protected]
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Abstract

Before each of around 200,000 eye movements we make each day, the brain decides how long to fixate before shifting gaze to new information. Here we investigate this process using a large-scale scene-viewing experiment (4,080 natural scenes, five participants) that combines magnetoencephalography, eye tracking and a semantic captioning task. Using multivariate analysis of magnetoencephalography source-space patterns, behavioral analyses and artificial neural network (ANN) modeling, we show that longer fixations do not reflect prolonged visual processing but relate to downstream memory encoding. First, temporal variability of ventral stream representational dynamics did not explain variability in fixation duration. Second, fixation durations were anticorrelated with ANN-estimated patch classification difficulty. Third, fixation durations correlate positively with ANN-predicted patch memorability and caption-inclusion and co-occur with increased theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling, particularly in frontal and hippocampal regions. These results indicate that eye-movement timing decisions are shaped by memory-encoding demands rather than by perceptual processing limits.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{sulewski2026fixation,
  title = {{Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand}},
  author = {Philip Sulewski and Carmen Amme and Martin N. Hebart and Peter König B and Tim Christian Kietzmann},
  journal = {Nature Neuroscience},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  doi = {10.1038/s41593-026-02285-1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02285-1},
  note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand
AU  - Philip Sulewski
AU  - Carmen Amme
AU  - Martin N. Hebart
AU  - Peter König B
AU  - Tim Christian Kietzmann
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/25
JO  - Nature Neuroscience
DO  - 10.1038/s41593-026-02285-1
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02285-1
AB  - Before each of around 200,000 eye movements we make each day, the brain decides how long to fixate before shifting gaze to new information. Here we investigate this process using a large-scale scene-viewing experiment (4,080 natural scenes, five participants) that combines magnetoencephalography, eye tracking and a semantic captioning task. Using multivariate analysis of magnetoencephalography source-space patterns, behavioral analyses and artificial neural network (ANN) modeling, we show that longer fixations do not reflect prolonged visual processing but relate to downstream memory encoding. First, temporal variability of ventral stream representational dynamics did not explain variability in fixation duration. Second, fixation durations were anticorrelated with ANN-estimated patch classification difficulty. Third, fixation durations correlate positively with ANN-predicted patch memorability and caption-inclusion and co-occur with increased theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling, particularly in frontal and hippocampal regions. These results indicate that eye-movement timing decisions are shaped by memory-encoding demands rather than by perceptual processing limits.
SN  - 1097-6256
SN  - 1546-1726
ER  -