Lateral eye movement as a measure of cognitive ability and style.

Research on lateral eye movements has examined personality and cognitive correlates with the hope of establishing such eye movements as a measure of preference for the different modes of information-processing associated with each of the cerebral hemispheres. Unfortunately, a review of this research provides only conflicting, tenuous substantiation for such hypotheses. The present study attempts to resolve the conflict within previous research by investigating the validity of the measure across a variety of tests of cognitive ability and preference, utilizing several procedures for scoring and classifying subjects on the measure. However, evidence for this measure's ability to predict cognitive performance linked to hemispheric specialization--in any of our conditions--was extremely meager. The usefulness of lateral eye movements as a diagnostic tool must be considered highly suspect; despite this fact, the measure may yet prove to be of some theoretical significance.