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.

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…

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!