People who have faster eye movements make more impulsive decisions, a latest study states.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Medicine conducted a small study on 23 participants. They observed saccades or the quick eye movements that occur while focusing on different objects.
The authors told the volunteers to look at a screen where dots would appear one at a time - first on one side of the screen, then on the other, then back again. Their saccades were recorded as they looked from one dot to the other, the researchers explained in the study.
In order to find out whether the saccade speed was linked to impulsivity and decision-making, the participants were told to look at the screen again. But this time the participants had to obey visual commands to look at a particular direction on the screen. If they missed out, a buzzer would ring.
The final results showed that people who had greater eye speed made decisions on impulse and tended to be less willing to wait, that means they were found to be impatient. "Our hypothesis is that there may be a fundamental link between the way the nervous system evaluates time and reward in controlling movements and in making decisions. After all, the decision to move is motivated by a desire to improve one's situation, which is a strong motivating factor in more complex decision-making, too," said principal investigator Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University.
The investigators said a better understanding of how the human brain evaluates time when making decisions might also shed light on why malfunctions in certain areas of the brain make decision-making harder for those with neurological disorders like schizophrenia, or those with brain injuries.
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
