14 DAY TRIAL // Our antipathetic partners say we, men, look for women on the street, when in fact, what we do is just to strengthen our memories...
Or so says a new research made at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. The researchers say that for a better memory formation, you have to move your eyes from side-to-side for 30 seconds, an action believed to trigger an interaction between the brain's hemispheres, a crucial process for recalling certain types of memories.
Other researches found that horizontal eye movements help people recall better words they have just seen. This team checked if such eye movements also help people recognize freshly seen words.
Recognition memory, opposite to recall memory, makes people trying to recognize words store false memories named source monitoring errors, attributing them to the wrong source (they can believe they have heard in the afternoon a word which in fact was heard in the morning, for example.)
The 102 subjects were presented recordings of a male voice reading aloud 20 lists of 15 words, of which some did not have a specific "lure" word, but words that converged with it, like "thread," "eye," "sewing" and "sharp" instead of "needle".
After that, 33 % of the subjects watched a computer prompt that initiated side-to-side eye movements for 30 seconds, 33 % a computer with up-to-down eye movements, and the final third did nothing. After that, they had to pick out the heard words from a list. Source monitoring errors in this case represented the choice of unheard words: the subjects couldn't make the difference between hearing and having thought the words.
The first group recalled correctly, on average, with roughly 10 % more words, and committed about 15 % less source monitoring errors than the others. "The movements could be helping people identify the true source of their memories," said Stephen Christman, a psychologist at the University of Toledo.
He made another research on the issue, with similar results, but he thinks much more researches are needed to establish a clear link between eye movements and a better memory forming. "Let's say you're leaving a mall after a long day shopping and you realize, 'Oh God, I can't remember where I parked my car. Would it help you if you stood there in the parking lot and just wiggled your eyes back and forth for 30 seconds?" he said.