Interesting that 20% of subjects were incapable of fixing their gaze when instructed to, while performing long term memory retrieval tasks. While the study doe

Interesting that 20% of subjects were incapable of fixing their gaze when instructed to, while performing long term memory retrieval tasks. While the study doesn't have a big answer as to why, their speculation sounds reasonable: > we speculate that the ability to search for information stored in long-term memory may have developed from already-existing neural systems that enable the search for information in the visual environment. People use saccades to scan the visual environment. When they locate a stimulus of interest, scanning ceases and they focus on that stimulus. By analogy, people make multiple eye movements when they “scan” for information in long-term memory and very few eye movements when they “focus” on information in the working-memory “buffer.”