A new research article published in Nature on 22/01/2024

Effects of Involuntary Eye Movements on Memory Tasks

In this study, researchers looked at how involuntary eye movements (like small fixational eye movements) can be affected by the tasks our brain is performing.

They found that when participants had to remember more things, their eye movements were reduced, and their performance on the memory task improved.

This suggests that our eyes might be “silenced” to help us concentrate on the task at hand.

The researchers used eye-tracking technology to study these eye movements while participants completed memory tasks with colored shapes.

The results showed that as the memory load increased, the participants’ eye movements were inhibited more strongly, and their task performance improved.

Relationship Between Memory Load and Eye Movements

The study involved 26 participants who viewed briefly flashed colored shapes and were asked to remember specific shapes for a short time before being tested on their memory.

The researchers found that more shapes to remember led to a greater reduction in eye movements, not just during the initial memory task but also during the period when participants were holding the information in their memory and when they were retrieving the information.

This suggests that our eye movements are linked to the effort of remembering things.

Impact of Eye Movements on Memory Performance

The researchers also found that participants were more accurate in the memory task when their eye movements were reduced.

This suggests that when our eyes are essentially “quieted down” during memory tasks, we can perform the tasks more effectively.

The study’s findings also indicated that when participants had to remember more things, their eye movements were silenced earlier, lasted longer and were reduced more during all stages of the memory process, showing that the brain might be using our eye movements as a way to indicate how much effort it is putting into remembering things.

This could help us understand how our brain manages the amount of information we are trying to remember and may have implications for understanding the processes involved in memory and concentration.

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Interestingly, a study was previously published in 2014, Vision Research (Elsevier), that showed as association between ADHD and failure to suppress eye blinks and microsaccades. It was also seen that after ADHD medication response to visual stimuli recovers.

The paper investigated the oculomotor behavior of individuals with ADHD using a continuous performance test (CPT).

The researchers recorded eye movements, including microsaccade rates, blink rates, and pupil dilation, while participants performed a visual attention task.

They found that unmedicated ADHD-diagnosed individuals had difficulty suppressing eye blinks and microsaccades when anticipating visual stimuli.

However, when these individuals were medicated, their ability to suppress these eye movements improved, suggesting that medication has a positive effect on their anticipatory mechanism.

The study suggests that these oculomotor measures could potentially serve as objective physiological markers for diagnosing ADHD, and it also highlights the potential of using oculomotor parameters for differential diagnosis.