MEGA — reading memory from the eyes

A no-report paradigm that quantifies episodic memory from anticipatory eye gaze, published in Nature Communications Psychology.

MEGA (Memory Episode Gaze Anticipation) is the research program behind my MSc at Tel Aviv University’s Yuval Nir Lab: a method to measure whether someone remembers an event without asking them — by tracking where their eyes go.

The idea

When people re-watch a movie clip, their gaze starts drifting toward the location of a salient event seconds before it appears — but only if they remember it. That anticipatory gaze is a readable memory trace:

“Even when subjects said they didn’t remember, their gaze direction showed they did. This means that sometimes people remember, but can’t say that they remember.”

Daniel Yamin presenting the MEGA paradigm procedure slide — two viewings of movie clips two hours apart, then a verbal memory report — in a Tel Aviv University lecture hall
Presenting the MEGA procedure at Tel Aviv University, January 2024: watch the clips, wait two hours, watch again — the eyes give the memory away before the verbal report does.
Daniel Yamin pointing at gaze-anticipation figures on the poster 'Episodic memory assessment using gaze patterns during repeated viewing of naturalistic movies'
Poster at ISFN 2022, the Israel Society for Neuroscience annual meeting — the first public outing of the gaze-anticipation results, two years before the preprint.

The machine-learning core

Daniel Yamin adjusting equipment beside a participant wearing an EEG electrode cap in the lab, a still from the Channel 13 News feature
In the lab with a participant — from the Channel 13 News feature on the research.

The paradigm is as much an ML problem as a neuroscience one: raw eye-tracking streams go through signal processing and feature extraction, and a classifier identifies — from single-trial gaze features — whether a given viewing reflects memory for the event.

Why it matters

Memory assessment today mostly requires verbal reports. MEGA opens the door to measuring memory in populations that can’t provide them — patients with brain injuries, pre-verbal infants, even animals — with applications from early dementia screening to basic memory research.

Outputs