Re:Neural Circuits Control Eye Movements - Research

(snip)
"The study hinges on a long-known fact in visual attention -- that humans and primates can attend to something without moving their eyes to that object. This ability is useful for many animals that encounter social situations in which there is a potential danger in looking directly at another animal."

It seems that such data actually further support the hypothesis that eye movements are NOT necessary: we don't need to engage our eyes at the thing to which we want to attend. We can focus our attention, or distract our attention without having to actually alter where our receptors are directed. Maybe altering our recepters increases the focusing or distracting of attention, but apparently it's not necessary.

By the way, it still doesn't show that eye movements have any effect on TREATMENT OUTCOME for PTSD when using EMDR. Depending on how you view the role of eye movements (as either focusing or distracting attention) in EMDR and whether focusing or distracting is a good or bad thing, you could justify both positions that eye movements should help or eye movements should hinder. For example, if rapidly shifting your eyes makes it more difficult to attend to the trauma memory, because you are adding non-trauma stimuli to the overall input, and if attending to the trauma memory is necessary for processing the trauma memory, then eye movements would be predicted to have a harmful effect on treatment outcome because it hinders processing the memory. Or, if EMDR relies on distraction, but eye movements actually serve to focus attention on the trauma-imagery, then the eye movements prevent distraction and again should have a harmful effect on outcome. This line of research may add to our overall knowledge and at some point be part of an overall explanation of why EMDR works. But at present, we still don't have a phenomon (with regard to eye movements in EMDR) that requires explanation.

(Was that a predictable repsonse or what?)

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Re:Neural Circuits Control Eye Movements - Research, by guest, 01/24/03

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