Visual working memory and eye movements in context: How we make use of the external world

Abstract

While walking through the forest, while at a sports match, or while assembling Swedish furniture, we constantly visually sample our surroundings. Luckily, sampling relevant visual information from the external world is not just a challenge that we need to solve – the external world itself can also ease that challenge, because much of the visual information remains available and allows us to sample from it in a just-in-time manner. I outline in the first four chapters that where and when we make eye movements to sample from the external world is highly intertwined with how we make use of visual working memory, and vice versa. I describe additional mechanisms of this trade-off between internally storing information in visual working memory versus externally sampling information, and provide an integrated account of how these mechanisms interact. Furthermore, I describe in the last two chapters that where we make eye movements differs between people; and how we make eye movements is linked to our state of arousal. When and how we make use of visual working memory and eye movements to sample from the external world is incredibly dynamic and contextual, effectuated by a trade-off which weighs almost every aspect of the challenges and affordances provided by the external world. In this dissertation, I have therefore argued that it is of great importance to investigate how we make use of the external world by studying both visual working memory and eye movements in their respective and combined contexts.