Autobiographical Implicit Association Test and eye movements: fixations topography enables detection of autobiographical memories

Abstract

Introduction: Autobiographical memory is the capacity to recollect memories of personally experienced events. The detection of such memories plays a key role in criminal trials. Among behavioral memory-detection methods, the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) has gained popularity for its flexibility and suitability for forensic applications. The aIAT is a reaction time-based methodology aiming to assess whether information about an event is encoded in the respondent's mind. Here, we introduced the eye-D index, a measure based on the topography of fixations while performing the aIAT, as an additional measure to detect autobiographical memories covertly.

Methods: In this study, participants were involved in a mock-crime experiment in which they could act as Guilty or Innocent. One week later all participants underwent the aIAT combined with eye-tracking to investigate the presence of the crime-related memory.

Results: Guilty participants showed a higher number of fixations towards the category labels in the block in which true sentences shared the same response key with crime-related sentences, as compared to the block in which true sentences were paired with sentences describing an alternative version. Innocent participants showed the opposite pattern. This unbalanced allocation of attention to the category labels was quantified by the eye-D index and was found to be highly correlated to the standard aIAT-D index.

Discussion: This suggests that more fixations to the category labels could indicate increased cognitive load and monitoring of response conflicts. These preliminary results highlight eye-tracking as a tool to detect autobiographical memories covertly while performing the aIAT.

Keywords: aIAT; autobiographical memory; eye movements; eye-tracking; fixations.