Abstract
Perception and recall recruit overlapping neural systems in the human brain. They are further linked on a behavioral level through gaze reinstatement, the recapitulation of encoding related gaze patterns during recall. Here, we ask whether eye movements during recall reflect the event structure of continuous narratives, and whether the aforementioned neural overlap is grounded in shared gaze patterns. We tested this by combining eye tracking and deep learning-based gaze predictions with fMRI data acquired while participants watched and recalled a movie. First, we tested whether frame-wise saliency maps of the movie predict eye movements during recall of the corresponding movie scenes. Second, by reconstructing gaze behavior from the MR-signal of the eyes and relating it to brain activity, we show that eye movements do indeed drive wide-spread brain activity in both domains. In a series of follow-up analyses, we then characterized the relationship between event-specific eye movements, the multi-voxel pattern of the eyes and brain activity in detail. Our preliminary results suggest that both perception and recall of continuous narratives recruit our oculomotor systems, which may help reassemble our perceptual experiences for recollection and mental imagery.