How goals shape naturalistic memories: bias in gaze and narrative recall

Abstract

Episodic memories are thought to represent information framed by our individual perception and goals, yet personal experiences are hard to evaluate externally. Due to novel methodological advances, we could now trace the development of such goal-shaped memories in a naturalistic experimental setting. We recorded eye-tracking while participants encoded episodic-like memories, and later recorded participants freely narrating their experiences. Naturalistic goal-states were induced by introducing a secret job, which promised to reward participants later for person-based or space-based information. Using computer-vision based semantic segmentation of visual scanning behaviour in movie scenes and data-driven coding of free recall performance, we show that these goals increasingly shift attention during memory encoding and systematically bias narration during retrieval to goal-relevant dimensions. Our findings highlight that we can use data-driven methodology to observe how naturally occurring or induced biases shape how we perceive and remember the world.