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Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering

Memory & Cognition volume 26, pages 651–658 (1998)Cite this article

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. —Milan Kundera,Slowness (1996, p. 39)

Abstract

When people are asked moderately difficult questions, they often avert their gazes. We report five experiments in which we documented this phenomenon. They demonstrate that (1) the frequency of gaze aversion is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, (2) this behavior cannot be due solely to demand characteristics or embarrassment, and (3) the behavior is functional: Averting the gaze improves performance. We speculate that averting the gaze helps people to disengage from environmental stimulation and thereby enhances the efficiency of cognitive processing directed by nonenvironmental stimulation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 West Johnson Street, 53706, Madison, WI

    Arthur M. Glenberg, Jennifer L. Schroeder & David A. Robertson

Authors
  1. Arthur M. Glenberg
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  2. Jennifer L. Schroeder
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  3. David A. Robertson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Arthur M. Glenberg.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by AFOSR AASERT Grant F49620-92-J-0310 and University of Wisconsin Graduate Research Committee Grant 940109. The data were presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society in 1995, and they serve as part of the second author’s senior honor’s thesis. We thank Jennifer Jansen for her help in collecting the data for Experiment 4, and Dacher Keltner for the use of his equipment and laboratory space for Experiment 3.

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Glenberg, A.M., Schroeder, J.L. & Robertson, D.A. Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Memory & Cognition 26, 651–658 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211385

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211385

Keywords

  • Retention Interval
  • Journal ofExperimental Psychology
  • Index Card
  • Mathematics Question
  • Research Requirement