The effect of eye contact on the retention of information

The effect of eye contact on the retention of information

Cristina Galusca1, Alveno Vitale1, Luca L. Bonatti1,2

1. Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

2. ICREA

Learning information generalizable to kinds relies highly on the presence of ostensive-referential cues used by teachers to direct novices´ attention to the relevant aspects of their message. Also, the type of information infants attend to depends on the presence of ostensive-communicative signals.

Here, we present a series of six experiments aimed at identifying the kind of information for which ostensive signals are particularly relevant in adult participants (N: 188, aged 18 to 35 years). We isolated a simple ostensive cue, eye contact, and evaluated how adults are influenced by its presence when they are scantly exposed to information of different kinds, ranging from digit span, word and nonword span to complex knowledge such as names or generic/specific facts about novel objects.

We found no effect of eye contact on the low-level tasks (digit span, word and nonword span). By contrast, eye contact had an impact on the retention of facts. One week after one single exposure to a movie in which the actress made or did not make eye contact with the participants, specific facts were better remembered when presented ostensively. We suggest that in adults, ostensive cues may consolidate the memory traces of episodic facts even after a brief encounter with a novel fact. Because of its selectivity to particular kinds of information, this effect cannot be explained by a simple increase in attention. Instead, it appears that ostensive cues modify the relevance of otherwise meaningless episodic information.