MEMORY FOR STRUCTURAL INFORMATION ACROSS EYE-MOVEMENTS

Previous research has demonstrated that visual information is retained across eye movements at a more abstract level than at a point-by-point buffer. The results of 3 experiments, in which part-whole verification, same-different discrimination, and mental synthesis were used, show that one of the ways in which abstract visual information is represented is in the form of structural descriptions and that these structural descriptions are used in transsaccadic memory in the same manner as they are used in visual short-term memory. These results lend support to the idea that the memory store that retains information transsaccadically is in fact visual short-term memory (D.E.Irwin, 1991).