Is there eye-position-dependent facilitation of memory?

Abstract

It was hypothesized that if eye-position-dependent facilitation of information retrieval underlies the phenomenon of lateral eye movements (LEMs), then subjects whose visual fixation points were assigned during both encoding and retrieval would have better recall when the points for encoding and retrieval were the same than when they were different. Sixty student volunteers gazed either straight ahead, 20 degrees right, 40 degrees right, 20 degrees left, or 40 degrees left while encoding and retrieving verbally presented word pairs. Response latency, as measured by stopwatch from audio recordings, was significantly greater for difficult word pairs when encoding and retrieval points were different, (t = 1.73, df = 59, p less than .05, one-tailed). This facilitation effect applied particularly to subjects who were nondirectional in their LEM preference. For right and left lookers, the phenomenon of shorter latency of retrieval on a verbal task when looking toward the right was found when encoding and retrieval points were different, [F(1,35) = 15 16, p less than .001], but not when they were the same [F(1,35) = .36, N.S.]. It was concluded that further studies of LEM patterns should include both encoding and retrieval and should take subject variables into account.