Eye movements in response to different cognitive activities measured by eyetracking: a prospective study on some of the neurolinguistics programming theories

Description

The eyes are in constant movement to optimize the interpretation of the visual scene by thebrain. Eye movements are controlled by complex neural networks that interact with the restof the brain. The direction of our eye movements could thus be influenced by our cognitiveactivity (imagination, internal dialogue, memory, etc.). A given cognitive activity could thencause the gaze to move in a specific direction (a brief movement that would be instinctiveand unconscious).Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), which was developed in the 1970s by RichardBandler and John Grinder (psychologist and linguist respectively), issued a comprehensivetheory associating gaze directions with specific mental tasks. According to this theory, dependingon the visual path observed, one could go back to the participant's thoughts andcognitive processes. Although NLP is widely used in many disciplines (communication,psychology, psychotherapy, marketing, etc), to date, few scientific studies have examinedthe validity of this theory.Using eye tracking, this study explores one of the hypotheses of this theory, which is one ofthe pillars of NLP on visual language. We created a protocol based on a series of questionsof different types (supposed to engage different brain areas) and we recorded by eye trackingthe gaze movements at the end of each question while the participants were thinking andelaborating on the answer. Our results show that 1) complex questions elicit significantlymore eye movements than control questions that necessitate little reflection, 2) the movementsare not random but are oriented in selected directions, according to the different questiontypes, 3) the orientations observed are not those predicted by the NLP theory.This pilot experiment paves the way for further investigations to decipher the close linksbetween eye movements and neural network activities in the brain.

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