Evidence of Anticipatory Eye Movements in the Spatial Hebb Repetition Effect: Insights for Modeling Sequence Learning

In the present study, the authors offer a window onto the mechanisms that drive the Hebb repetition effect through the analysis of eye movement and recall performance. In a spatial serial recall task in which sequences of dots are to be remembered in order, when one particular series is repeated every 4 trials, memory performance markedly improves over repetitions. This is known as the Hebb repetition effect. Eye movement recorded during the presentation of the to-be-remembered (TBR) information revealed that for the repeated sequence, participants fixated the location of the next TBR location before the actual presentation of the dot. The extent to which a TBR location was anticipated increased over repetition and occurred only for post-initial positions of the repeated sequence. Eye movement-based rehearsal activity was related to recall performance but not to sequence learning. The findings provide further evidence of anticipatory behavior in sequence learning and place key constraints on modeling the Hebb repetition effect.