Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People tend to look at uninformative, blank locations inspace when retrieving information. This gaze behaviour,known as looking at nothing, is assumed to be driven by theuse of spatial indices associated with external information.We investigated whether people form spatial indices andlook at nothing when retrieving words from memory.Participants were simultaneously presented four words.During retrieval participants looked at the relevant, blanklocation, where the probe word had appeared previously,longer than the other blank locations. Additionally, wordpresentation was sometimes followed by a visual cue eitherco-located or not with the probe word. Valid cues functionedas visual reinforcement while invalid cues causedinterference. Finally, participants with better visuospatialmemory looked less at the relevant, blank location,suggesting a dynamic relationship between so-called“external” and “internal” memory. Overall findings suggestan automatic, instantaneous spatial indexing mechanism forwords and a dynamic looking at nothing behaviour.