Déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories as two distinct cases of familiarity in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

The continuum between involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu, as proposed by Barzykowski and Moulin, can be better defined by considering research on autobiographical retrieval in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Although autobiographical retrieval in patients with Alzheimer's disease can generally be associated with a sense of familiarity, involuntary retrieval can trigger an autonoetic experience of retrieval in these patients.

"Look at the future": Maintained fixation impoverishes future thinking.

We evaluated the relationship between eye movements and future thinking. More specifically, we evaluated whether maintained fixation could influence cognitive characteristics of future thinking. We invited participants to imagine future events in two conditions: while freely exploring a white wall and while fixating a cross on the wall. Results demonstrated fewer and longer fixations, as well as fewer and shorter saccades during maintained fixation condition than in the free gaze condition. Shorter total amplitude of saccades was also observed during the maintained fixation condition than during the free-gaze condition. Regarding the cognitive characteristics of future thinking, fewer spatiotemporal details and less visual imagery, slower retrieval time, and shorter descriptions were observed for future thinking during maintained fixation than during free-gaze condition. These results demonstrate that maintaining fixation results in an effortful construction of future scenarios. We suggest that maintained fixation limits the cognitive resources that are required for future thinking.

Eyes don't lie: Eye movements differ during covert and overt autobiographical recall.

In everyday life, autobiographical memories are revisited silently (i.e., covert recall) or shared with others (i.e., overt recall), yet most research regarding eye movements and autobiographical recall has focused on overt recall. With that in mind, the aim of the current study was to evaluate eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical memories (with a focus on emotion), recollected during covert and overt recall. Forty-three participants recalled personal memories out loud and silently, while wearing eye-tracking glasses, and rated these memories in terms of mental imagery and emotional intensity. Analyses showed fewer and longer fixations, fewer and shorter saccades, and fewer blinks during covert recall compared with overt recall. Participants perceived more mental images and had a more intense emotional experience during covert recall. These results are discussed considering cognitive load theories and the various functions of autobiographical recall. We theorize that fewer and longer fixations during covert recall may be due to more intense mental imagery. This study enriches the field of research on eye movements and autobiographical memory by addressing how we retrieve memories silently, a common activity of everyday life. More broadly, our results contribute to building objective tools to measure autobiographical memory, alongside already existing subjective scales.