Gus Hennings
@gushennings.bsky.social
F32 Postdoc fellow at Princeton w/ Ken Norman, working on neurofeedback for increasing inhibitory control of memory. On the job market!
I knew this intuitively from looking at the wiki over the past month, but still a gut punch to see it plainly laid out
September 4, 2025 at 1:50 PM
I knew this intuitively from looking at the wiki over the past month, but still a gut punch to see it plainly laid out
We hope that this simple behavioral method will open a new frontier in studying memory suppression, with strong applications to clinical populations suffering from memory control disorders (e.g., PTSD, GAD, OCD).
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
We hope that this simple behavioral method will open a new frontier in studying memory suppression, with strong applications to clinical populations suffering from memory control disorders (e.g., PTSD, GAD, OCD).
In summary: Participants’ eye gaze can provide rich insights into both the top-down strategies that they use to suppress memories and also the bottom-up retrieval dynamics that give rise to lasting forgetting.
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
In summary: Participants’ eye gaze can provide rich insights into both the top-down strategies that they use to suppress memories and also the bottom-up retrieval dynamics that give rise to lasting forgetting.
These results are in line with theories of active forgetting, which suggest that memories must first become active to some degree before lasting forgetting can occur.
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
These results are in line with theories of active forgetting, which suggest that memories must first become active to some degree before lasting forgetting can occur.
But for pairs that were subsequently forgotten, we saw a different pattern, where there was a brief period of initial gaze reinstatement (corresponding to the memory “intruding” into mind), followed by gaze repulsion.
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
But for pairs that were subsequently forgotten, we saw a different pattern, where there was a brief period of initial gaze reinstatement (corresponding to the memory “intruding” into mind), followed by gaze repulsion.
We also explored how gaze repulsion (during the suppression attempt related to subsequent memory. Gaze dynamics were very different for to-be-suppressed pairs that were subsequently remembered vs. forgotten. For pairs that were subsequently remembered, participants showed robust gaze repulsion…
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
We also explored how gaze repulsion (during the suppression attempt related to subsequent memory. Gaze dynamics were very different for to-be-suppressed pairs that were subsequently remembered vs. forgotten. For pairs that were subsequently remembered, participants showed robust gaze repulsion…
We hypothesize that gaze repulsion is a strategy that people use to short-circuit retrieval when it starts to happen. This fits with other recent work showing that eye movements can play an active role in cueing - or even disrupting - memory retrieval.
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
We hypothesize that gaze repulsion is a strategy that people use to short-circuit retrieval when it starts to happen. This fits with other recent work showing that eye movements can play an active role in cueing - or even disrupting - memory retrieval.
But what happens when people are shown the scene and are told to suppress retrieval of the associated object? Here, we find that people actually look AWAY from the object’s studied location – gaze repulsion!
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
But what happens when people are shown the scene and are told to suppress retrieval of the associated object? Here, we find that people actually look AWAY from the object’s studied location – gaze repulsion!
Previous studies have found that, when people study scene-object pairs, and they are later instructed to retrieve the object given the scene, they look at the location where the object had been presented (gaze reinstatement) – we found this too.
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Previous studies have found that, when people study scene-object pairs, and they are later instructed to retrieve the object given the scene, they look at the location where the object had been presented (gaze reinstatement) – we found this too.
The ability to suppress retrieval is adaptive - but it is not clear how the intent to suppress changes how we interact with retrieval cues. This paper used a pre-registered eye tracking paradigm to examine how we interact with retrieval cues to prevent the retrieval of memories.
May 9, 2025 at 5:39 PM
The ability to suppress retrieval is adaptive - but it is not clear how the intent to suppress changes how we interact with retrieval cues. This paper used a pre-registered eye tracking paradigm to examine how we interact with retrieval cues to prevent the retrieval of memories.