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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
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.