The Contributions of Eye Gaze Fixations and Target-Lure Similarity to Behavioral and fMRI Indices of Pattern Separation and Pattern Completion

Abstract Pattern separation and pattern completion are generally studied in humans using mnemonic discrimination tasks such as the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) where participants identify similar lures and repeated items from a series of images. Failures to correctly discriminate lures are thought to reflect a failure of pattern separation and a propensity toward pattern completion. Recent research has challenged this perspective, suggesting that poor encoding rather than pattern completion accounts for the occurrence of false alarm responses to similar lures. In two experiments, participants completed a continuous recognition task version of the MST while eye movement (Experiments 1 and 2) and fMRI data (Experiment 2) were collected. In Experiment 1, we replicated the result that fixation counts at study predicted accuracy on lure trials (consistent with poor encoding predicting mnemonic discrimination performance), but this effect was not observed in our fMRI task. In both experiments we found that target-lure similarity was a strong predictor of accuracy on lure trials. Further, we found that fMRI activation changes in the hippocampus were significantly correlated with the number of fixations at study for correct but not incorrect mnemonic discrimination judgments when controlling for target-lure similarity. Our findings indicate that while eye movements during encoding predict subsequent hippocampal activation changes for correct mnemonic discriminations, the predictive power of eye movements for activation changes for incorrect mnemonic discrimination trials was modest at best.