Amnesia is a deficit in relational memory.

Eye movements were monitored to assess memory for scenes indirectly (implicitly). Two eye movement-based memory phenomena were observed: (a) the repetition effect, a decrease in sampling of previously viewed scenes compared with new scenes, reflecting memory for those scenes, and (b) the relational manipulation effect, an increase in viewing of the regions where manipulations of relations among scene elements had occurred. In normal control subjects, the relational manipulation effect was expressed only in the absence of explicit awareness of the scene manipulations. Thus, memory representations of scenes contain information about relations among elements of the scenes, at least some of which is not accessible to verbal report. But amnesic patients with severe memory impairment failed to show the relational manipulation effect. Their failure to show any demonstrable memory for relations among the constituent elements of scenes suggests that amnesia involves a fundamental deficit in relational (declarative) memory processing.

Eye-movement-based memory effect: a reprocessing effect in face perception.

An eye-movement-based memory effect was demonstrated in 2 experiments showing different patterns of eye movements elicited to famous versus nonfamous faces, across a range of different processing tasks. The effects of prior exposure emerged early in viewing, within the first 5 fixations, and were observed on multiple measures of eye-movement behavior, reflecting a change in viewers' sampling behavior to the famous faces. Accordingly, the eye-movement-based memory effect can be seen as a change in the nature of processing of novel versus repeated items, with implications for other effects of prior exposure such as those seen in examples of repetition priming. The authors argue that the eye-movement-based memory effect is an obligatory consequence of previous exposure--a reprocessing effect caused by re-engaging the visual pattern analyzers and face processing machinery of the brain.