“Background and objectives: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. It uses a dual-task approach, in which patients recall an aversive memory while making lateral eye movements. Research has shown that this ‘eye movements’ intervention reduces subjective memory vividness and emotionality. This study examined whether it also reduces memory accuracy on a visual discrimination task.

Highlights:

• Induced eye movements during trauma memory recall is often applied in PTSD treatment.
• We tested whether an analogue dual task procedure reduces objective memory accuracy.
• Recall of a face image was followed by a discrimination task with novel similar faces.
• Eye movements were associated with increased false-positive rates at 24-h follow-up.
• Eye movement interventions may have unwanted effects related to memory accuracy.”