Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We are interested in a functional account of how capacity constrains memory use in natural, ongoing behaviors, and in how visual memory demands can be reduced through the use of what we have called perceptual pointers, or deictic codes. Here, we ask whether, with experience, participants can restructure task representations such that single fixations can point to more and more complex chunks of information. We tracked eye movements as participants copied simple model patterns which were presented with different frequencies. At first, participants made multiple fixations to individual pattern components. As patterns were presented repeatedly, model inspections were reduced substantially. This suggests that participants formed more compact representations of the patterns with experience, allowing single fixations to point to larger chunks of information. We also propose that deictic codes provide a short-term store analogous to the visuo-spatial scratchpad or articulatory loop. When the task was structured such that a separate visual search was required for each model component, much less learning was observed than when fixations to known locations were required, suggesting deictic codes were disrupted by active visual search.