Eye Movements and Working Memory

Eye movement recording can be used to investigate
the mechanics and involvement of working memory in
the completion of visual tasks. One study that I
present claims that iconic representations of objects
in multiple resolutions are used for efficient,
coarse-to-fine visual search. Another study investigates
hand and eye movements in a block copying task. It is
shown that working memory use is minimized, which is
compensated by additional eye movements. The claim is
that subjects use the visual scene as their "external 
memory" instead of building an internal representation
of the visual scene. Therefore, there should be a 
tradeoff between "cheap" eye movements and "expensive"
working memory use. This tradeoff is investigated in
a third study, which supports the existence of such
tradeoff by showing that making eye movements more
expensive leads to increased working memory use.