Effects of Aging, Handedness and Saccadic Bilateral Eye Movements on Autobiographical Episodic Memory Recall

Booth, Kathryn Elizabeth (2019) Effects of Aging, Handedness and Saccadic Bilateral Eye Movements on Autobiographical Episodic Memory Recall. Manchester Metropolitan University. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Past research has shown that saccadic bilateral eye movements, handedness and age affect performance on recall tasks focussing on episodic autobiographical memory recall. Research has not looked at the interactions between these elements to see if they have a combined effect on episodic autobiographical memory recall. The current experiment will look to test the effects of handedness, age and eye movements on episodic autobiographical memory recall, by assessing recall for both episodic memory and semantic memory with participants aged 18-89. Participants followed an eye movement (bilateral or still) and then answered various recall questions such as ‘recall of events from 5-11 years old’. It was found that overall saccadic bilateral eye movements and handedness had no effect on recall, however there were significant main effects of age. These findings illustrate that the influences of saccades and handedness may be due to hemispheric lateralisation not due to corpus callosum size or communication between the hemispheres. Future research should consider whether retrieval is explained by the reminiscence bump and if there are other processes which cause a link between eye movements and memory recall.