Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand
Philip Sulewski, Carmen Amme, Martin N. Hebart, Peter König, Tim C. Kietzmann · 2026
Read Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand by Philip Sulewski, Carmen Amme, Martin N. Hebart, Peter König, Tim C. Kietzmann (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13246442.txt.
Description
Philip Sulewski and co-authors ask why our eyes linger longer on some spots than others in a 2026 brain study. Each day we make about 200,000 eye movements, pausing from a blink to half a second. Long pauses were assumed to mean hard visual work.
Five people viewed more than 4,000 natural scenes while brain waves and gaze were tracked. Brain pattern timing did not explain the longer pauses. In fact, spots that models found easy to classify drew longer looks. Pauses instead tracked how memorable a spot was and whether people later named it. Brain rhythms linked to memory rose during long pauses. Memory writing, not visual strain, seems to set the dwell time.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Philip Sulewski, Carmen Amme, Martin N. Hebart, Peter König, Tim C. Kietzmann |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 78 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |