How do eye movements correlate with cognition?

Question

i.e. when someone's eyes are facing a certain direction it indicates how they're thinking.. whether they're sensing or thinking or w/e i read somewhere that some psychologist i think it was freud was good at reading other people's eye movements that he could finish other people's sentences... am i making any sense here? lol

Answer 1

why not try to do it to yourself. if it really interests you why don't you know your eye movement behaviour.

Answer 2

yh u are making sense but i dont believe that someone can allways finish someone elses sentences. sometimes u can just guess what someone is going 2 say and thats quite natural but he wouldnt be able 2 finish my sentences cause half the time i dont no wot im gonna say myself lol

Answer 3

1. The idea that eye movements correlate with anything is mostly from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and what they say about it is mostly unverified and not the result of any solid research. Indeed, nearly everything in NLP is borrowed from other psychologies and, especially, personal-development courses such as EST and "encounter groups" from the 1970s.

2. I'm not sure how Freud could be seen as having been very good at reading peoples' "eye movement" or body signs in general. He was a

shy man at heart, and did not like to look directly at people. Nor would he enter a room where people were waiting, and instead would stand in the doorway, and not look at them while he talked with them. (Fritz Perls had this experience with Freud at a psycho-analytic conference. He was incredibly eager to meet his hero, Freud, and to realize that he was such a shy man and reluctant to talk with people made him re-think the whole idea of psycho-analysis!)

Also, Freud's shyness was behind his sitting behind his patients while they lay on a couch in front of, and facing away from, him. Again...he did NOT like to look at people directly, so I don't see how he could have been good at reading body movements.

3. In terms of founding psychiatristsd being able to read peoples' body language, etc., you may be thinking of Dr. Alfred Adler, who was very good at it. For one thing, he was careful to note where each patient sat when entering the counseling room. For another, he would specifically neglect to hear what the patient was saying, and attend instead to what their body was doing:  nervous twitches, crossing of legs, wringing of hands, playing with wedding ring, etc. And for a third, he would watch the face for indictations of what was going on in the patient's mind. For example, he might make an observation, and the paitient would disagree...except his mouth would curl in a half-smile, giving away that he believed Adler to be on target! Adler would comment on the half-smile (which occurs often in therapy, by the way) and in every case the patient would admit that Adler had said something he (the patient) knew to be true but did not want to believe.

-- Dr. Bob

PS: Sorry about mis-spellings...Yahoo's checker seems not to be working tonight!