Spontaneous eye movements reflect the representational geometries of conceptual spaces

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Vigano, Simone; Bayramova, Rena; Doeller, Christian F.; Bottini, Roberto
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; University of Trento; Max Planck Society; Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-10032
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2403858121
• 发表日期: 2024-04-23
• 关键词: visual space; cognitive maps; hippocampal; memory; time; KNOWLEDGE; position; components; navigation; direction

摘要

Functional neuroimaging studies indicate that the human brain can represent concepts and their relational structure in memory using coding schemes typical of spatial navigation. However, whether we can read out the internal representational geometries of conceptual spaces solely from human behavior remains unclear. Here, we report that the relational structure between concepts in memory might be reflected in spontaneous eye movements during verbal fluency tasks: When we asked participants to randomly generate numbers, their eye movements correlated with distances along the left- to- right one- dimensional geometry of the number space (mental number line), while they scaled with distance along the ring- like two- dimensional geometry of the color space (color wheel) when they randomly generated color names. Moreover, when participants randomly produced animal names, eye movements correlated with low- dimensional similarity in word frequencies. These results suggest that the representational geometries used to internally organize conceptual spaces might be read out from gaze behavior.