Combined action observation and motor imagery facilitates visuomotor adaptation in children with developmental coordination disorder.

The internal modelling deficit (IMD) hypothesis suggests that motor control issues associated with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) are the result of impaired predictive motor control. In this study, we examined the benefits of a combined action observation and motor imagery (AO + MI) intervention designed to alleviate deficits in internal modelling and improve eye-hand coordination during a visuomotor rotation task. Twenty children with DCD were randomly assigned to either an AO + MI group (who watched a video of a performer completing the task whilst simultaneously imagining the kinaesthetic sensations associated with action execution) or a control group (who watched unrelated videos involving no motor content). Each group then attempted to learn a 90° visuomotor rotation while measurements of completion time, eye-movement behaviour and movement kinematics were recorded. As predicted, after training, the AO + MI group exhibited quicker completion times, more target-focused eye-movement behaviour and smoother movement kinematics compared to the control group. No significant after-effects were present. These results offer further support for the IMD hypothesis and suggest that AO + MI interventions may help to alleviate such deficits and improve motor performance in children with DCD.

Association between prism adaptation and auditory cues on spatial navigation in individuals with unilateral neglect.

BACKGROUND: Unilateral neglect is common among right-hemispheric stroke individuals and also concerns the auditory modality. Prism adaptation can improve auditory extinction during a dichotic listening task, but its effect during an ecological task has not been studied. OBJECTIVE: The main objective was to evaluate whether lateralized cueing before and after prism adaptation improved virtual spatial navigation of stroke individuals with visual and auditory unilateral neglect. Secondary objectives were to assess spatial memory and obtain a better understanding of the mechanism of the cueing treatment by using an eye-tracker. METHODS: We included 22 stroke individuals with left visual and auditory neglect, 14 individuals without neglect, and 12 healthy controls. After a familiarization task, participants underwent 3 evaluation sessions. Participants were first passively shown a path that they had then to actively reproduce by using a joystick. A path with lateralized beeping sounds indicating direction and a path without any sounds were followed in a randomized order. After prism adaptation, the participants followed a third path with lateralized beeping sounds. The time of navigation and number of trajectory mistakes were recorded. After navigation, spatial memory was assessed. Additionally, an eye-tracker was used during the navigation period. RESULTS: The navigational performance of participants with neglect was significantly better with than without auditory cues, especially after prism adaptation. With auditory cues, participants without neglect reached the navigational performance of healthy controls. The spatial memory of individuals with neglect was significantly lower with auditory cues. Eye-tracking analyses showed that participants with neglect made more saccades and looked longer at the right-square angles in the absence of auditory cues. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the positive effect of auditory cues in virtual spatial navigation of individuals with visual and auditory neglect and the potentiation of the help of cues after prism adaptation.

Using Action-congruent Language Facilitates the Motor Response during Action Observation: A Combined Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Eye-tracking Study.

There is evidence that action observation (AO) and the processing of action-related words are associated with increased activity in cortical motor regions. Research has examined the effects of AO and action verb processing on activity in the motor system independently. The aim of this experiment was to investigate, for the first time, the modulation of corticospinal excitability and visual attention during the concurrent processing of action verbs and AO stimuli. Twenty participants took part in an integrated transcranial magnetic stimulation and eye-tracking protocol. Single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was delivered to the hand representation of the left motor cortex during (i) observation of a static hand, (ii) AO of a hand squeezing a sponge, (iii) AO of the same action with an audio recording of the word "squeeze," and (iv) AO of the same action with an audio recording of the word "green". Motor evoked potentials were recorded from the abductor pollicis brevis and abductor digiti minimi muscles of the right hand. Eye gaze was recorded throughout the four conditions as a proxy for visual attention. Interviews were conducted to discuss participants' preferences and imagery use for each condition. The AO and action verb condition resulted in significantly increased motor evoked potential amplitudes in the abductor pollicis brevis muscle; participants also made significantly more fixations on the sponge and reported wanting to move their hand more in the action verb condition. The inclusion of auditory action verbs, alongside AO stimuli, in movement simulation interventions could have implications for the delivery of AO interventions for motor (re)learning.

Adolescent Attention to Disgust Visuals in Cigarette Graphic Warning Labels.

PURPOSE: Adolescents are often a target audience for disgust-eliciting antismoking messages, including graphic warning labels (GWLs) on cigarette packages. Yet, few studies have examined how adolescents attend and respond to disgust imagery frequently depicted in these messages. METHODS: A within-subjects eye-tracking experiment with middle school youth (N = 436) examined attention for GWLs that feature disgust versus nondisgust images. Hypotheses were based on emotion theory and previous findings with adult participants. This study also tested whether living with a smoker moderated effects of attention on negative emotions and risk beliefs. RESULTS: Participants paid similar levels of attention to warnings with disgust visuals as they did warnings with nondisgust visuals, accounting for other differences in the warnings. The presence of a disgust visual drew greater attention to the warning image and reduced attention for the warning text. These viewing patterns were similar for youth who live with a smoker and those who do not. Attention to disgust imagery was the only attentional factor to predict negative emotional reactions, and this relationship was driven by results observed among youth who live with a smoker. Attention to neither image nor text predicted risk beliefs. CONCLUSIONS: GWLs with disgust imagery do not trigger more or less attention to the overall warnings but do influence allocation of attention to images over text. Future work should confirm whether attention to disgust imagery itself is important for triggering negative emotional responses, particularly with youth for whom the message is more personally relevant.

Task-based fMRI of a free-viewing visuo-saccadic network in the marmoset monkey.

Saccadic tasks are often used to index aberrations of cognitive function in patient populations, with several neuropsychiatric and neurologic disorders characterized by saccadic dysfunction. The common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) has received recent attention as an additional primate model for studying the neural basis of these dysfunctions - marmosets are amenable to a host of genetic manipulation techniques and have a lissencephalic cortex, which is well suited for a variety of recording techniques (e.g., calcium imaging, laminar electrophysiology). Because the marmoset cortex is mostly lissencephalic, however, the locations of frontal saccade-related regions (e.g., frontal eye fields (FEF)) are less readily identified than in Old World macaque monkeys. Further, although high quality histology-based atlases do exist for marmosets, identifying these regions based on histology alone is not always accurate, with the cytoarchitectonic boundaries often inconsonant with functional boundaries. As such, there is a need to map the functional location of these regions directly. Task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is of utility in this regard, allowing for detection of whole-brain signal changes in response to moving stimuli. Here, we conducted task-based fMRI in marmosets at ultra-high field (9.4 T) during a free-viewing visuo-saccadic task. We also conducted the same task in humans at ultra-high field (7 T) to validate that our simple task was indeed evoking the visuo-saccadic circuitry we expected (as defined by a meta-analysis of fMRI saccade studies). In the marmosets, we found that the task evoked a robust visuo-saccadic topology, with visual cortex (V1, V2, V3, V4) activation extending ventrally to MT, MST, FST and dorsally into V6, 19M, 23V. This topology also included putative cingulate eye field (area 32 and 24d), posterior parietal cortex (with strongest activation in lateral intraparietal area (LIP)), and a frontolateral peak in area 8 aV in marmosets, extending into 45, 46, 8aD, 6DR, 8c, 6 aV, 6DC. Overall, these results support the view that marmosets are a promising preclinical modelling species for studying saccadic dysfunction related to neuropsychiatric or neurodegenerative human brain diseases.

Eye tracker outcomes in a randomized trial of 40 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen or sham in participants with persistent post concussive symptoms.

PURPOSE: Eye movements may offer a sensitive method to measure response to intervention in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). METHODS: The Brain Injury and Mechanisms of Action of Hyperbaric Oxygen for Persistent Post-Concussive Symptoms after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Study (BIMA) randomized 71 participants to 40 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen or sham. A companion normative study (Normal) enrolled 75 participants. An eye tracking system measured left and right eye movements for saccadic and smooth pursuit. At baseline two smooth pursuit tasks, circular and horizontal ramp, and four saccadic tasks, horizontal and vertical step, reading, and memory guided-on tasks differentiated BIMA from Normal participants. The change from baseline in these tasks were measured and compared between interventions and against Normal participants at 13 weeks and six-month follow-up using the two-sample t-test. The Holm-Bonferroni procedure was used to adjust for multiple testing. RESULTS: Change from baseline in eyetracker measures for participants assigned to the hyperbaric oxygen arm did not significantly differ from those assigned to the sham arm at post-randomization time points 13 weeks and six months. Consistent shifts of BIMA participant values toward Normal values at 13 weeks and six months were observed for overall fixation duration, forward saccadic duration, and number of lines read for the reading task, number of misses on the memory guided-on task, and absolute intersaccadic interval velocity and absolute saccadic amplitude on the circular task. The distributions between Normal and BIMA participants were no longer statistically significantly different at 13 weeks and six months post enrollment for these measures. CONCLUSION: The baseline differences between BIMA and Normal suggest potential vulnerability of the smooth pursuit system and the saccadic system. During the six-month follow-up period, improvement toward Normal was seen on some measures in both the hyperbaric oxygen and sham intervention arms without difference between intervention groups. IDS: clinicaltrials.gov Identifiers NCT01611194 and NCT01925963.

Early amygdala damage alters the way rhesus macaques process species-specific audio-visual vocalizations.

Perceiving, integrating, and interpreting multimodal signals are essential for social success, but the neural substrates mediating these functions are not fully understood. This study examined the role of the amygdala in processing bimodal species-specific vocalizations using eye tracking in rhesus macaques. Looking behavior of 6 adult rhesus monkeys with neonatal amygdala lesions (Neo-Aibo; 3M, 3F) was compared with that of 6 sham-operated controls (Neo-C; 3M, 3F). Two side-by-side videos of unknown male conspecifics emitting different vocalizations were presented with the audio signal matching one video. The percentage of time spent looking at each video was used to assess crossmodal integration ability and the percentages of time spent looking at a priori regions of interest (ROIs; eyes, mouth, and rest of each video) were used to characterize scanning patterns. Both groups looked more to one video, indicating that early amygdalar damage did not impair crossmodal integration of complex social signals. However, scanning patterns differed across groups as a function of sex and stimulus parameter. Whereas Neo-C males exhibited differential viewing to the eye and mouth regions as a function of the relative identity of the stimulus animals and Neo-C females made similar distinctions as a function of the relative valence of the vocalizations in females, Neo-Aibo males and females scanned these regions similarly across all trial types. The results suggest that neonatal amygdala damage alters the ability to perceive the social relevance of stimulus features, and are consistent with a role of the amygdala in the recognition of the social salience of complex cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of Varying Color, Imagery, and Text of Cigarette Package Warning Labels among Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Middle School Youth and Adult Smokers.

The U.S. Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (Tobacco Control Act) of 2009 paved the way for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to propose nine different graphic warning labels (GWLs) intended for prominent placement on the front and back of cigarette packs and on cigarette advertisements. Those GWLs were adjudicated as unconstitutional on the ground that they unnecessarily infringed tobacco companies' free speech without sufficiently advancing the government's public health interests. This study examines whether less extensive alternatives to the original full-color GWLs, including black-and-white GWLs and text-only options, have similar or divergent effects on visual attention, negative affect, and health risk beliefs. We used a mobile media research lab to conduct a randomized experiment with two populations residing in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities: biochemically confirmed adult smokers (N = 313) and middle school youth (N = 340). Results indicate that full-color GWLs capture attention for longer than black-and-white GWLs among both youth and adult smokers. Among adults, packages with GWLs (in either color or black-and-white) engendered more negative affect than those with text-only labels, while text-only produced greater negative affect than the packages with brand imagery only. Among youth, GWLs and text-only labels produced comparable levels of negative affect, albeit more so than brand imagery. We thus offer mixed findings related to the claim that a less extensive alternative could satisfy the government's compelling public health interest to reduce cigarette smoking rates.

The relative efficacy of mindfulness versus distraction: The moderating role of attentional bias.

BACKGROUND: This study investigated whether the ability to disengage quickly from pain-related stimuli moderated the relative efficacy of a mindfulness-based intervention versus distraction in response to an experimental pain task. METHODS: Participants (n = 100) completed a dot probe task with eye tracking and were then randomized (2:2:1) to receive a mindfulness-based interoceptive exposure task (MIET), distraction instructions or no instructions (control group) before engaging in the cold pressor test. RESULTS: Participants who were allocated to the MIET condition reported a significantly higher pain threshold and distress than the distraction group, although not significantly higher than the control group. Those in the MIET group had improved tolerance compared to both the distraction and control groups. Difficulty disengaging from pain-related stimuli, as measured by the duration of the first fixation on sensory words, was found to moderate the relative efficacy of mindfulness versus distraction in terms of pain threshold and distress, but not tolerance. Those with difficulty disengaging from sensory pain words benefited less from the MIET. Duration of first fixation on sensory and affective pain words were highly correlated, and duration of first fixation on affective pain words also moderated the relative efficacy of MIET and distraction on threshold, but not distress. CONCLUSIONS: These results show that a single brief session of a mindfulness task was sufficient to change an acute pain experience in comparison with a distraction task, and that those who disengaged quickly from pain words benefited most. SIGNIFICANCE: This study demonstrated the efficacy of a novel, exposure-based mindfulness technique for pain tolerance and showed that those who disengaged easily from pain stimuli benefited most. This brief task could be clinically useful, particularly for those who are not overly focused on their pain symptoms.

Distraction by deviant sounds during reading: An eye-movement study.

Oddball studies have shown that sounds unexpectedly deviating from an otherwise repeated sequence capture attention away from the task at hand. While such distraction is typically regarded as potentially important in everyday life, previous work has so far not examined how deviant sounds affect performance on more complex daily tasks. In this study, we developed a new method to examine whether deviant sounds can disrupt reading performance by recording participants' eye movements. Participants read single sentences in silence and while listening to task-irrelevant sounds. In the latter condition, a 50-ms sound was played contingent on the fixation of five target words in the sentence. On most occasions, the same tone was presented (standard sound), whereas on rare and unexpected occasions it was replaced by white noise (deviant sound). The deviant sound resulted in significantly longer fixation durations on the target words relative to the standard sound. A time-course analysis showed that the deviant sound began to affect fixation durations around 180 ms after fixation onset. Furthermore, deviance distraction was not modulated by the lexical frequency of target words. In summary, fixation durations on the target words were longer immediately after the presentation of the deviant sound, but there was no evidence that it interfered with the lexical processing of these words. The present results are in line with the recent proposition that deviant sounds yield a temporary motor suppression and suggest that deviant sounds likely inhibit the programming of the next saccade.

How Do You Deal With Uncertainty? Cochlear Implant Users Differ in the Dynamics of Lexical Processing of Noncanonical Inputs.

OBJECTIVES: Work in normal-hearing (NH) adults suggests that spoken language processing involves coping with ambiguity. Even a clearly spoken word contains brief periods of ambiguity as it unfolds over time, and early portions will not be sufficient to uniquely identify the word. However, beyond this temporary ambiguity, NH listeners must also cope with the loss of information due to reduced forms, dialect, and other factors. A recent study suggests that NH listeners may adapt to increased ambiguity by changing the dynamics of how they commit to candidates at a lexical level. Cochlear implant (CI) users must also frequently deal with highly degraded input, in which there is less information available in the input to recover a target word. The authors asked here whether their frequent experience with this leads to lexical dynamics that are better suited for coping with uncertainty. DESIGN: Listeners heard words either correctly pronounced (dog) or mispronounced at onset (gog) or offset (dob). Listeners selected the corresponding picture from a screen containing pictures of the target and three unrelated items. While they did this, fixations to each object were tracked as a measure of the time course of identifying the target. The authors tested 44 postlingually deafened adult CI users in 2 groups (23 used standard electric only configurations, and 21 supplemented the CI with a hearing aid), along with 28 age-matched age-typical hearing (ATH) controls. RESULTS: All three groups recognized the target word accurately, though each showed a small decrement for mispronounced forms (larger in both types of CI users). Analysis of fixations showed a close time locking to the timing of the mispronunciation. Onset mispronunciations delayed initial fixations to the target, but fixations to the target showed partial recovery by the end of the trial. Offset mispronunciations showed no effect early, but suppressed looking later. This pattern was attested in all three groups, though both types of CI users were slower and did not commit fully to the target. When the authors quantified the degree of disruption (by the mispronounced forms), they found that both groups of CI users showed less disruption than ATH listeners during the first 900 msec of processing. Finally, an individual differences analysis showed that within the CI users, the dynamics of fixations predicted speech perception outcomes over and above accuracy in this task and that CI users with the more rapid fixation patterns of ATH listeners showed better outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Postlingually deafened CI users process speech incrementally (as do ATH listeners), though they commit more slowly and less strongly to a single item than do ATH listeners. This may allow them to cope more flexible with mispronunciations.

Why are you looking at me? It's because I'm talking, but mostly because I'm staring or not doing much.

Our attention is particularly driven toward faces, especially the eyes, and there is much debate over the factors that modulate this social attentional orienting. Most of the previous research has presented faces in isolation, and we tried to address this shortcoming by measuring people's eye movements whilst they observe more naturalistic and varied social interactions. Participants' eye movements were monitored whilst they watched three different types of social interactions (monologue, manual activity, active attentional misdirection), which were either accompanied by the corresponding audio as speech or by silence. Our results showed that (1) participants spent more time looking at the face when the person was giving a monologue, than when he/she was carrying out manual activities, and in the latter case they spent more time fixating on the person's hands. (2) Hearing speech significantly increases the amount of time participants spent looking at the face (this effect was relatively small), although this was not accounted for by any increase in mouth-oriented gaze. (3) Participants spent significantly more time fixating on the face when direct eye contact was established, and this drive to establish eye contact was significantly stronger in the manual activities than during the monologue. These results highlight people's strategic top-down control over when they attend to faces and the eyes, and support the view that we use our eyes to signal non-verbal information.

Eye position reflects the spatial coding of numbers during magnitude comparison.

Behavioral studies have reported interactions between number processing and spatial attention, suggesting that number processing involves shifting attention along a mental continuum on which numbers are represented in ascending order. However, direct evidence for attention shifts remains scarce, the respective contribution of the horizontal and vertical axes is unclear, and little is known about the time course of attention shifts during mental manipulation of numbers. In the present study, we used an eye-tracking device with a high spatiotemporal resolution to measure gaze patterns in a task that required participants to compare number words (20 to 70) to a fixed reference (45) while looking at a blank screen (Experiment 1) or at colorful pictures (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 revealed late attention shifts evoking an epiphenomenon rather than a functional process because they occurred after the response. Experiment 2 revealed horizontal and vertical attention shifts emerging during the first stages of the comparison process. A leftward and downward ocular drift was observed while participants were listening to numbers smaller than the reference compared to numbers larger than the reference. The results showed that earlier shifts were observed when numbers were far from the reference because the decade was sufficiently discriminating to allow a fast decision. In contrast, close numbers were associated with later attention shifts because their proximity with the reference required processing the unit. We conclude that number comparison is a dynamic process that exploits visual imagery mechanisms to magnify the position of numbers on a two-dimensional space representing their magnitude. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Illuminating sex differences in mental rotation using pupillometry.

We use pupillometry to measure sex differences in mental rotation (MR) and to investigate the contentious claim that it is a unique spatial ability marked by male advantage in performance. Across two MR tasks - using Shepard-Metzler style cube figures and images of human hands - we measure reaction time (RT) and sensitivity, d', and supplement these behavioural data with a physiological metric of 'cognitive effort', pupil diameter. Differences in RT and in d' between the sexes are slight for the cubes task, while females are consistently faster than males on the hands task. In contrast, pupillometry reveals striking a sex difference, with males showing significantly lower pupil dilation during the cubes task, suggesting less cognitive effort for comparable behavioural performance. This difference is attenuated during the MR of hands, in line with recent findings that sex differences in spatial abilities dissipate when elements of social perspective taking are introduced. Taxonomy: Attention, Perception.

Language-driven anticipatory eye movements in virtual reality.

Predictive language processing is often studied by measuring eye movements as participants look at objects on a computer screen while they listen to spoken sentences. This variant of the visual-world paradigm has revealed that information encountered by a listener at a spoken verb can give rise to anticipatory eye movements to a target object, which is taken to indicate that people predict upcoming words. The ecological validity of such findings remains questionable, however, because these computer experiments used two-dimensional stimuli that were mere abstractions of real-world objects. Here we present a visual-world paradigm study in a three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual reality environment. Despite significant changes in the stimulus materials and the different mode of stimulus presentation, language-mediated anticipatory eye movements were still observed. These findings thus indicate that people do predict upcoming words during language comprehension in a more naturalistic setting where natural depth cues are preserved. Moreover, the results confirm the feasibility of using eyetracking in rich and multimodal 3-D virtual environments.

Does lexical stress influence 17-month-olds' mapping of verbs and nouns?

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong) stress. We explored whether 17-month-old infants use word stress to resolve an ambiguous labeling event where objects and actions are equally plausible referents. Infants were habituated to 2 words paired with 2 objects, with each object performing a distinct path action. They were subsequently tested on (a) a change in object but not path action or (b) a change in path action but not the object. When infants were taught verb-friendly iambic labels, their looking times increased both when the action switched and when the object switched. Infants who were taught noun-friendly trochaic labels demonstrated an increase in looking time only when the object switched. These results demonstrate that in ambiguous labeling events infants map iambic labels to both actions and objects, and trochaic labels to the objects but not to the actions, suggesting a bias for words with trochaic stress to refer to objects. Seventeen-month-old infants can use trochaic lexical stress to guide their word learning in ambiguous situations, but iambic stress cues may not preferentially guide infants' mappings of actions or objects. (PsycINFO Database Record

Assessment of vestibulo-ocular function without measuring eye movements.

BACKGROUND: The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) maintains stable gaze during head motion. Deficiencies lead to apparent world motion due to incomplete stabilization of eyes in space. VOR measurement requires specialized apparatus, trained operators, and significant setup time. NEW METHOD: We present a system (VON: vestibulo-ocular nulling) for rapid vestibulo-ocular assessment without measuring eye movements per se. VON uses a head-mounted motion sensor, laptop computer with user input control, and laser target whose position is controlled by the computer. As the head moves, the target is made to move in the same manner with a gain set by the subject. When the subject sets the gain so the target appears stationary in space, it is stationary on the retinas. One can determine from this gain the extent to which the eyes move in space when the head moves, which is the amount by which the VOR is deficient. From this the gain of the compensatory eye movements is derived. RESULTS: VON was compared with conventional video-based VOR measures. Both methods track expected changes in gain over 20min of adaptation to minifying spectacles. VON measures are more consistent across subjects, and pre-adaptation values are closer to compensatory. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHOD: VON is a rapid means to assess vestibulo-ocular performance. As a functional perceptual measure, it accounts for gaze-stabilizing contributions that are not apparent in the standard VOR, such as pursuit and perceptual tolerance. CONCLUSIONS: VON assesses functional VOR performance. Future implementations will make VOR assessment widely available to investigators and clinicians.

The effect of beat frequency on eye movements during free viewing.

External periodic stimuli entrain brain oscillations and affect perception and attention. It has been shown that background music can change oculomotor behavior and facilitate detection of visual objects occurring on the musical beat. However, whether musical beats in different tempi modulate information sampling differently during natural viewing remains to be explored. Here we addressed this question by investigating how listening to naturalistic drum grooves in two different tempi affects eye movements of participants viewing natural scenes on a computer screen. We found that the beat frequency of the drum grooves modulated the rate of eye movements: fixation durations were increased at the lower beat frequency (1.7Hz) as compared to the higher beat frequency (2.4Hz) and no music conditions. Correspondingly, estimated visual sampling frequency decreased as fixation durations increased with lower beat frequency. These results imply that slow musical beats can retard sampling of visual information during natural viewing by increasing fixation durations.

Using eye movements to explore mental representations of space.

Visual mental imagery is a cognitive experience characterised by the activation of the mental representation of an object or scene in the absence of the corresponding stimulus. According to the analogical theory, mental representations have a pictorial nature that preserves the spatial characteristics of the environment that is mentally represented. This cognitive experience shares many similarities with the experience of visual perception, including eye movements. The mental visualisation of a scene is accompanied by eye movements that reflect the spatial content of the mental image, and which can mirror the deformations of this mental image with respect to the real image, such as asymmetries or size reduction. The present article offers a concise overview of the main theories explaining the interactions between eye movements and mental representations, with some examples of the studies supporting them. It also aims to explain how ocular-tracking could be a useful tool in exploring the dynamics of spatial mental representations, especially in pathological situations where these representations can be altered, for instance in unilateral spatial neglect.