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How the eyes betray your thoughts

Look closer at eye movements and you can find out what s happening inside somebody s
head, says Mo Costandi.
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By Mo Costandi
22 May 2015
It s sometimes said that the eyes are windows into the soul, revealing deep emotio
ns that we might otherwise want to hide. Although modern science precludes the e
xistence of the soul, it does suggest that there is a kernel of truth in this ol
d saying: it turns out the eyes not only reflect what is happening in the brain
but may also influence how we remember things and make decisions.
We're not always conscious of how our eyes move
Our eyes are constantly moving, and while some of those movements are under cons
cious control, many of them occur subconsciously. When we read, for instance, we
make a series of very quick eye movements called saccades that fixate rapidly o
n one word after another. When we enter a room, we make larger sweeping saccades
as we gaze around. Then there are the small, involuntary eye movements we make
as we walk, to compensate for the movement of our head and stabilise our view of
the world. And, of course, our eyes dart around during the rapid eye movement (RE
M) phase of sleep.
Dilated pupils reveal uncertainty in decision-making (Credit: Thinkstock)
What is now becoming clear is that some of our eye movements may actually reveal
our thought process.
Research published last year shows that pupil dilation is linked to the degree o
f uncertainty during decision-making: if somebody is less sure about their decis
ion, they feel heightened arousal, which causes the pupils to dilate. This chang
e in the eye may also reveal what a decision-maker is about to say: one group of
researchers, for example, found that watching for dilation made it possible to
predict when a cautious person used to saying no was about to make the tricky deci
sion to say yes .
If somebody is unsure about a decision, their pupils dilate
Watching the eyes can even help predict what number a person has in mind. Tobias
Loetscher and his colleagues at the University of Zurich recruited 12 volunteer
s and tracked their eye movements while they reeled off a list of 40 numbers.
They found that the direction and size of the participants eye movements accurate
ly predicted whether the number they were about to say was bigger or smaller tha
n the previous one and by how much. Each volunteer s gaze shifted up and to the ri
ght just before they said a bigger number, and down and to the left before a sma
ller one. The bigger the shift from one side to the other, the bigger the differ
ence between the numbers.
What number am I thinking of? (Credit: Thinkstock)
...a big number, because I'm looking up and right (Credit: Thinkstock)
This suggests that we somehow link abstract number representations in the brain
with movement in space. But the study does not tell us which comes first: whethe
r thinking of a particular number causes changes in eye position, or whether the
eye position influences our mental activity. In 2013, researchers in Sweden pub
lished evidence that it s the latter that may be at work: eye movements may actual
ly facilitate memory retrieval.
Wandering eyes? It may aid your memory
They recruited 24 students and asked each one to carefully examine a series of o

bjects displayed to them in one corner of a computer screen. The participants we


re then told to listen to a series of statements about some of the objects they
had seen, such as The car was facing to the left and asked to indicate as quickly
as possible if each was true or false. Some participants were allowed to let the
ir eyes roam about freely; others were asked to fix their gaze on a cross at the
centre of the screen, or the corner where the object had appeared, for example.
The researchers found that those who were allowed to move their eyes spontaneous
ly during recall performed significantly better than those who fixed on the cros
s. Interestingly, though, participants who were told to fix their gaze in the co
rner of the screen in which objects had appeared earlier performed better than t
hose told to fix their gaze in another corner. This suggests that the more close
ly the participants eye movements during information encoding corresponded with t
hose that occurred during retrieval of the information, the better they were at
remembering the objects. Perhaps that s because eye movements help us to recall th
e spatial relationships between objects in the environment at the time of encodi
ng.
Certain eye movements aid memory recall (Credit: Thinkstock)
Certain eye movements aid memory recall (Credit: Thinkstock)
These eye movements can occur unconsciously. When people are looking at scenes th
ey have encountered before, their eyes are frequently drawn to information they
have already seen, even when they have no conscious memory of it, says Roger Joha
nsson, a psychologist at Lund University who led the study.
Vision control
Watching eye movements can also be used to nudge people s decisions. One recent st
udy showed maybe worryingly
that eye-tracking can be exploited to influence the
moral decisions we take.
Researchers asked participants complex moral questions such as Can murder ever be
justified? and then displayed, on a computer screen, alternative answers ( sometim
es justifiable or never justifiable ). By tracking the participants eye movements, an
d removing the two answer options immediately after a participant had spent a ce
rtain amount of time gazing at one of the two options, the researchers found tha
t they could nudge the participants to provide that particular option as their a
nswer.
Skilled salespeople could use eye movements to influence buying decisions
We didn t give them any more information, says neuroscientist Daniel Richardson of U
niversity College London, senior author of study. We simply waited for their own
decision-making processes to unfold and interrupted them at exactly the right po
int. We made them change their minds just by controlling when they made the deci
sion.
Richardson adds that successful salespeople may have some insight into this, and
use it to be more persuasive with clients. We think of persuasive people as good
talkers, but maybe they re also observing the decision-making process, he says. May
be good salespeople can spot the exact moment you re wavering towards a certain ch
oice, and then offer you a discount or change their pitch.
The ubiquity of eye-tracking apps for smartphones and other hand-held devices ra
ises the possibility of altering people s decision-making process remotely. If you re
shopping online, they might bias your decision by offering free shipping at the
moment you shift your gaze to a particular product.
You don't need a scan to see inside the mind (Credit: Thinkstock)
Thus, eye movements can both reflect and influence higher mental functions such
as memory and decision-making, and betray our thoughts, beliefs, and desires. Th
is knowledge may give us ways of improving our mental functions
but it also leav
es us vulnerable to subtle manipulation by other people.
The eyes are like a window into our thought processes, and we just don t appreciate
how much information might be leaking out of them, says Richardson. They could po
tentially reveal things that a person might want to suppress, such as implicit r
acial bias.

I can see eye-tracking apps being used for, say, supportive technologies that fig
ure out what phone function you need and then help out, he adds, but if they re left
on all the time they could be used to track all sorts of other things. This wou
ld provide much richer information, and raises the possibility of unwittingly sh
aring our thoughts with others.

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