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When people are asked moderately difficult questions, they often avert their gazes. Wereport five experiments in which we documented this phenomenon. They demonstrate that (I) the frequency of gaze aversion is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, (2) this behavior cannot be due solely to demand characteristics or embarrassment, and (3) the behavior is functional: Avertingthe gaze improves performance. Wespeculate that averting the gaze helps people to disengage from environmental stimulation and thereby enhances the efficiency of cognitive processing directed by nonenvironmental stimulation. 651There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.-Milan Kundera, Slowness (1996, p. 39) What is behind Kundera's commonplace observation? Our research suggests an answer: When engaged in difficult cognitive activity, we close our eyes or look at the sky to suppress the environment's control over cognition. Because information from the environment is suppressed, we slow down and stop walking to avoid hurting ourselves. In the five experiments reported here, we document behaviors associated with moderately difficult remembering-namely, averting the gaze by closing the eyes, covering the eyes, or looking at a uniform field such as the floor, ceiling, or sky. In Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrate that the frequency of gaze aversion is correlated with difficulty of the autobiographical (Experiment 1) or general knowledge (Experiment 2) questions asked. In Experiment 3, we showed that people avert their gaze even when social cues are eliminated. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrate that this form of behavior is functional; that is, the behavior is causally related to improvements in performance.Why might people engage in gaze aversion? The phenomenon is predicted from an analysis ofmemory reported in Glenberg (1997). Glenberg proposes that memory evolved in the service ofaction, and that potential patterns ofaction are the basis of meaning and conceptualization.

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We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions involved in the process of mapping coherent discourse onto a developing mental representation. We manipulated discourse coherence by presenting sentences with definite articles (which lead to more coherent discourse) or indefinite articles (which lead to less coherent discourse). Comprehending connected discourse, compared with reading unrelated sentences, produced more neural activity in the right than left hemisphere of the frontal lobe. Thus, the right hemisphere of the frontal lobe is involved in some of the processes underlying mapping. In contrast, left-hemisphere structures were associated with lower-level processes in reading (such as word recognition and syntactic processing). Our results demonstrate the utility of using fMRI to investigate the neural substrates of higher-level cognitive processes such as discourse comprehension.