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Moving your eyes improves memory, MMU study suggests

Brain able to trace true memories

IF you're looking for a memory fix, move your eyes from side to side for 30 seconds, researchers say.

Horizontal eye movements are thought to cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more with one another, boosting the brain’s ability to retrieve memories.

Dr Andrew Parker, a psychologist specialising in cognitive neuroscience at MMU, has now discovered more about this fascinating phenomenon.

In tests in college students, Dr Parker found horizontal eye movements, boosted memory up to 10% and also related the improvements to different types of memory: recognition memory and recall memory.

Phantom memories

Recognition memory can fail when a person attributes, for instance, a word’s familiarity to the wrong source — they might think they just read the words, when they had actually heard them in a conversation earlier that day, for example.

To test whether horizontal eye movements improved memory and reduced recognition error, Dr Parker and his colleagues presented 102 college students with recordings of a male voice reading aloud 20 lists of 15 words.

Some of the lists converged around a "lure" word that wasn't presented, but suggested by related words.

A third followed a computer prompt that initiated side-to-side eye movements for 30 seconds. Another third did the same with up-to-down eye movements, and the final third did nothing. Then the subjects were handed a list of words and asked to pick out the ones they had just heard.

10 per cent greater

The researchers found that the people who performed the horizontal eye movements correctly remembered, on average, more than 10 percent more words, and falsely recognized about 15 percent fewer "lure" words than the people who performed vertical eye movements or no movements at all.

The work suggests that the eye movements could be helping people identify the true source of their memories.

The study published in Brain and Cognition and was reported in the USA on Fox News.

Published Monday, 30th April 2007