Eye movement and memory retrieval are deeply and bidirectionally intertwined, however existing literature is generally confined to controlled lab settings. We investigate the relationship between eye gaze and memory recall in free-form autobiographical recall, which comprises both autonoetic consciousness -- the ability to mentally place oneself in the past or future -- and various affective states. Using a large video corpus of semi-naturalistic interviews with Holocaust survivors (N = 806), we examine eye movements with respect to episodic, semantic, affective, and temporal dimensions of traumatic and highly emotional autobiographical recall. We observe gaze patterns vary significantly across certain temporal contexts, most prominently in vertical eye movements. We additionally train intra-subject sequence models to predict temporal context of sentences from segments of gaze features, and find that eye movements entirely preceding sentence onset are sufficient for prediction. Our results corroborate prior findings in literature linking eye movements to memory in controlled and semi-structured settings, reinforcing the role of eye gaze in retrieving and constructing memories, especially in highly emotional and remote memory recall.

翻译：眼球运动与记忆提取之间存在深刻且双向的关联，但现有研究通常局限于受控实验室环境。本研究探讨了自由形态自传体回忆中眼球注视与记忆提取的关系，这种回忆既包含自我意识能力（即个体在心理上将自己置于过去或未来的能力），也涉及多种情感状态。基于大屠杀幸存者半自然访谈的大型视频语料库（N=806），我们从情节性、语义性、情感性和时间性四个维度分析了创伤性及高情感自传体回忆中的眼球运动。我们发现注视模式在不同时间背景中存在显著差异，尤其在垂直眼球运动方面最为突出。此外，我们训练了受试者内序列模型，通过片段级注视特征预测句子的时间背景，并发现完全早于句子起始的眼球运动足以完成预测。我们的结果佐证了先前文献中关于受控与半结构化情境下眼球运动与记忆关联的发现，进一步强化了注视在记忆提取与建构中的作用，特别是在高情感和遥远记忆回忆中的角色。