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Can your eyes reveal when you're telling a lie? The answer is no, according to a new study.

Research published July 11 in the journal PLoS ONE reveals that this claim is unfounded, with the authors calling on the public and organizations to abandon this approach to lie detection.

Experts have long claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth.

Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom tested this popular belief by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills," Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire said.

The researchers say that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit.

"A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organizational training courses," Caroline Watt of the University of Edinburgh said.

Howard Ehrlichman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Queens College of the City University of New York, has done research on eye movements and told ABC News that he also never found any link between the direction of eye movements and lying.

"This does not mean that the eyes don't tell us anything about what people are thinking," he said. "I found that while the direction of eye movements wasn't related to anything, whether people actually made eye movements or not was related to aspects of things going on in their mind."