Introduction: EMDR therapy is effective for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and includes performing eye movements while reactivating the memory. Consequently, the relationship between eye movements and memory has been studied. There are studies that show that verbal episodic memories improve with the realization of eye movements before reactivating them. Alternatively, decreased emotionality and vividness of visual memories and experimental traumatic memories, which are mostly encoded as images, were observed with eye movements during reactivation. However, these studies did not assess memory performance.

Purpose: To assess whether performing eye movements during reactivation decreases visual stimuli recall.

Methods: A study is being carried out with university students and graduates. They are assigned randomly to one of three conditions: eye movements, fixed sight in the centre with visual stimulation, and fixed sight in the centre without visual stimulation. The first day they learn a series of images. Twenty-four hours later, they make a free recall test along with the task corresponding to the condition.

Results: Preliminary results show that both eye movements group an fixed sight with visual stimulation group have worse memory.

Discussion: Although it is necessary to increase the sample, a non-significant trend was observed. Considering that both eye movement group and fixed sight in the centre with visual stimulation group remember worse, the effect might not be eye movement specific. If this trend continues, specificity of eye movements for the detriment of traumatic memories during EMDR, should be reviewed. Considering the dual representation theory of PTSD, according to which a traumatic situation generates two memories: a verbal accessible memory and another of automatic access that promotes flashbacks and is mainly visual; future studies should evaluate whether the effect is the same for verbal stimuli or whether it is differential depending on the type of stimulus.