How goals shape naturalistic memories: bias in gaze and narrative recall

Induced person- or space-based goals shift attention during episodic-like memory encoding and systematically bias later free narrative recall toward goal-relevant dimensions, measured with eye-tracking and data-driven coding.

• Why it matters: Episodic memories are believed to reflect perception and goals, but it has been difficult to evaluate how goal framing shapes personal experiences using external measures.
• What they did: Participants encoded episodic-like memories while eye-tracking recorded gaze; secret job rewards induced person- or space-based goal-states, and computer-vision semantic segmentation plus data-driven recall coding quantified effects.
• The result: Goal-relevant attention increases during encoding and retrieval narration becomes biased toward goal-relevant dimensions, enabling observation of how induced biases shape naturalistic perception and memory.