The term Eye Accessing Cues refers to the positioning of the eye balls in certain areas when “accessing” information internally. They are based on certain criteria that generally revolve around the VAK predicate system with the addition of a category for raw information. It has been a strong buzz term for years at this point and carries with it quite a bit of controversy.
The picture to the left represents a right handed person and illustrates the layout of the cues. There are six access points and they include:
Visual Construct – (Vc) Upper Left
Visual Remembered – (Vr) Upper Right
Auditory Construct – (Ac) Left
Auditory Remembered – (Ar) Right
Kinesthetic – (K) Lower Left
Auditory Digital – (Aid) Lower Right
The first four are fairly self explanatory. The fifth, “kinesthetic” refers to emotions, tactile feelings and motor function (movement). The sixth, “auditory digital” refers to actual internal dialogue, meaning the information that is conveyed through your speech. If proven effective, this process has two extremely “attractive” qualities:
[amprotect=2, 3]
1. Strategy Elicitation – What is a strategy? Well regardless of what someone is doing, whether it is speech or movement/action or thinking or feeling, they mentally perform what can be termed a “strategy” which creates the “decision” to perform that speech, movement, etc… I am placing the term “decision” in quotations because the overwhelming majority of these are made non-consciously and as such, just “happen” as a response.
A strategy is a particular sequence of mental actions that take place to create the decision. A person’s strategy will be made up from the senses (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic and Auditory Digital) and they are the same for any particular action, each time it occurs. For instance, when a person moves themselves into a panic attack, they will follow the same internal strategy, which is prompted by a specific stimulus, every time to achieve their panic attack.
When someone has a problem such as anxiety, depression or panic attacks, a therapists ability to determine this strategy is a great starting place for therapy. The challenge though is that much of the strategy can happen out of conscious recognition and the ability to calibrate the eye accessing cues can help in determining this internal strategy.
2. Lie Detection – If you ask someone what they were doing last night and they are “Visually Constructing” rather than “Visually Remembering”, then they are thought to be creating an answer rather than presenting the remembered answer (which is the truth).
For the general public, especially regarding the latter, you can see the strong temptation that the believability of eye accessing cues carry. It would be a pretty good consolation prize in lieu of being able to actually mind read.
There has been quite a bit of controversy over the credibility of eye accessing cue efficacy and although there is much material that surrounds the usage of it, there is very little regarding empirical studies based on it. In fact, to the best of my knowledge the only empirical study available has been conducted by the persuasion authority Kevin Hogan (http://www.kevinhogan.com/NLPeyeaccess.htm ).
Over the next two posts we will discuss the neurology behind how and why our eyes move to certain places when we access information. We can then more intelligently decide on the efficacy and usage in helping establish excellence in communication.
[/amprotect]
To learn more about Eye Accessing Cues and other forms of effective communication, please visit my blog The Communication Expert. If I am online, please feel free to Skype me as well.
Email
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter