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Description: Objective: Long-term visual memory representations degrade as a function of semantic interference, as measured by recognition performance, and their strength is related to eye-movement responses. Even though clinical research has examined interference mechanisms in pathological cognitive ageing and explored the diagnostic potential of eye-movements in this context, little is known about their interaction in long-term visual memory. Method: An eye-tracking study compared a Mild Cognitive Impaired group with healthy controls. Participants watched a stream of 129 naturalistic images from different semantic categories, presented at different frequencies (1, 6, 12, 24) to induce semantic interference (SI), then asked in a 2-Alternative Forced Choice paradigm to verbally recognize the scene they remembered (old/novel). Results: Recognition accuracy of both groups was negatively impacted by SI, especially in the healthy controls. A wider distribution of overt attention across the scene predicted better recognition, especially by the MCI participants, although these fixation patterns were influenced by SI. MCI compensated the detrimental effect of SI by focusing overt attention during encoding and so accrue distinctive details of the scene, while they widened it during recognition to boost retrieval. Independently of the group: (a) the re-instatement of fixations indicated a more successful recall and increased as a function of SI; and (b) attending visually salient regions negatively impacted on recognition accuracy, although the reliance on such regions grew as SI increased. Conclusions: Semantic interference is reduced due to pathological ageing and coupled with subtle oculo-motor compensatory strategies, confirming the intimate connection between overt attention and memory processes.