PLE increased when MAXMEM reduced - How to explain this behavior?

Hello All,

The servers in questions are two node Active\ Passive SQL server clusters with 32GB RAM. Recently I changed MAXMEM configuration from default value to 26GB .Also I changed MINMEM to 8GB and MAXDOP to 8 (I arrived at these values after doing some analysis and searching for best practices on net). I noticed that Page Life Expectancy counters has shown improvement. For example - Before changeLow-High range for PLE was 13-393979 and After change is113500-135099. For other server it was 59346-60280 and after change it is196465-206335. Also Lazy Writes\Sec counter values have decreased, which is positive sign.

What can be the explanation for these improved counter values, when we have reduced  (i.e. set upper limit to) SQL memory?
Thanks 

Thanks, Nishad