The eyes may reveal how experiences are recalled according to new Baycrest research that suggests that shifts in eye movements play a critical role in memory retrieval. The findings offer new insight into how memory works and how it may change with brain disease.
The findings show that eye movements, specifically saccades, increase just before people recall episodic details – such as what was seen, heard or felt during past, real-life events – and decrease immediately afterward. This pattern was not observed when participants recalled non-episodic details, such as general facts or background information.
“By aligning eye movements with spoken recall on the order of milliseconds, we were able to see memory unfolding in real time,” says Dr. Brian Levine,…