Emotion and eye movements: eye tracker and mnestic parameters

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the mains mechanisms implicate in memory consolidation for stimuli and objects with emotive contents. Emotions are a fundamental part in human life. For this reason emotions are in close connection with other cognitive functions, such as attention and memory. In particular, attention influences memory in different ways, mainly by capture of attentive sources. Emotions 'retain' attention and direct it toward emotionally salient stimuli. In the first part of the chapter the relationship between attention and eye movement is explored. The study of eye movements is an important instrument to understand mechanisms of selective attention and switching it in the space. In fact, examination of the eye movement pattern of a viewer on a scene demonstrates that viewers do not fixate every part of the scene. For this reasons the use of eye tracker is aimed at understanding the mechanisms underlying the shift of attention in the space. After, the relation between eye movement and emotive responses is described. Pattern of different movements are linked to selective emotive responses modulated by attention. Furthermore, the capture of selective attention by stimuli with emotive contents is displayed, as an example of asymmetry in evaluation of emotive and neutral stimuli. Since attention precedes eye movements, indirectly attention is the vehicle by which information is stored in the working memory. The brain networks responsible for the planning and execution of eye movements are describe as partially overlapping with those involved in spatial attention and spatial working memory. Also, we describe the main evidence on gender differences in emotion recognition and visual scanning, because a great number of studies showing that male and female using different strategy to perceptual identify emotion expressions. The impact of strategy of scanning, together attentive and working memory mechanisms were explored based on sex differences. In the last part of the chapter, we present an experimental study, carry out to analyze the differences between male and female in relation to visual task containing neutral and emotional stimuli. More over the study explore gender difference in relation to the mnestic index, specifically to check the correlation between memory, FL indexes (fixations length) and the emotional or neutral stimuli. Finally, a third aim of the study was measuring FL parameters only on facial expression of the stimuli, to investigate the differences between males and females on the fixation time of the faces. © 2015 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.