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Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆

Humans have a highly developed visual system, yet we spend a high proportion of our time awake ignoring the visual world and attending to our own thoughts. The present study examined eye movement characteristics of goal-directed internally focused cognition. Deliberate internally focused cognition w...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Walcher, Sonja, Körner, Christof, Benedek, Mathias
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5704896/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28689088
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.009
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author Walcher, Sonja
Körner, Christof
Benedek, Mathias
author_facet Walcher, Sonja
Körner, Christof
Benedek, Mathias
author_sort Walcher, Sonja
collection PubMed
description Humans have a highly developed visual system, yet we spend a high proportion of our time awake ignoring the visual world and attending to our own thoughts. The present study examined eye movement characteristics of goal-directed internally focused cognition. Deliberate internally focused cognition was induced by an idea generation task. A letter-by-letter reading task served as external task. Idea generation (vs. reading) was associated with more and longer blinks and fewer microsaccades indicating an attenuation of visual input. Idea generation was further associated with more and shorter fixations, more saccades and saccades with higher amplitudes as well as heightened stimulus-independent variation of eye vergence. The latter results suggest a coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information and associated cognitive processes, i.e. searching for ideas. Our results support eye behavior patterns as indicators of goal-directed internally focused cognition through mechanisms of attenuation of visual input and coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information.
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spelling pubmed-57048962017-11-28 Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆ Walcher, Sonja Körner, Christof Benedek, Mathias Conscious Cogn Article Humans have a highly developed visual system, yet we spend a high proportion of our time awake ignoring the visual world and attending to our own thoughts. The present study examined eye movement characteristics of goal-directed internally focused cognition. Deliberate internally focused cognition was induced by an idea generation task. A letter-by-letter reading task served as external task. Idea generation (vs. reading) was associated with more and longer blinks and fewer microsaccades indicating an attenuation of visual input. Idea generation was further associated with more and shorter fixations, more saccades and saccades with higher amplitudes as well as heightened stimulus-independent variation of eye vergence. The latter results suggest a coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information and associated cognitive processes, i.e. searching for ideas. Our results support eye behavior patterns as indicators of goal-directed internally focused cognition through mechanisms of attenuation of visual input and coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information. 2017-07-06 2017-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5704896/ /pubmed/28689088 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.009 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Walcher, Sonja
Körner, Christof
Benedek, Mathias
Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
title Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
title_full Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
title_fullStr Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
title_full_unstemmed Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
title_short Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
title_sort looking for ideas: eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition☆
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5704896/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28689088
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.009
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