EyeLink Clinical and Oculomotor Eye-Tracking Publications
EyeLink clinical and oculomotor research publications up until 2023 (with some early 2024s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Saccadic Adaptation, Schizophrenia, Nystagmus, etc. You can also search for individual author names, and limit searches by year (choose the year then click the search button). If we missed any EyeLink clinical or oculomotor articles, please email us!
2023 |
Serena Micheletti; Giacomo Vivanti; Stefano Renzetti; Matteo Paolo Lanaro; Paola Martelli; Stefano Calza; Patrizia Accorsi; Stefania Agostini; Anna Alessandrini; Nicole D'Adda; Laura Ferrari; Valentina Foresti; Jessica Galli; Lucio Giordano; Melissa Marras; Alessandro Rizzi; Elisa Fazzi Social attention and social-emotional modulation of attention in Angelman syndrome: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Micheletti2023, Individuals with Angelman syndrome (AS) present with severe intellectual disability alongside a social phenotype characterised by social communication difficulties and an increased drive for social engagement. As the social phenotype in this condition is poorly understood, we examined patterns of social attention and social modulation of attention in AS. Twenty-four individuals with AS and twenty-one young children with similar mental age were shown videos featuring unfamiliar actors who performed simple actions across two conditions: a playful condition, in which the actor showed positive facial emotions, and a neutral condition, in which the actor showed a neutral facial expression. During the passive observation of the videos, participants' proportion of time spent watching the two areas of interest (faces and actions) was examined using eye-tracking technology. We found that the playful condition elicited increased proportion of fixations duration to the actor's face compared to the neutral condition similarly across groups. Additionally, the proportion of fixations duration to the action area was similar across groups in the two conditions. However, children with AS looked towards the actor's face for a shorter duration compared to the comparison group across conditions. This pattern of similarities and differences provides novel insight on the complex social phenotype of children with AS. |
Greta N. Minor; Deborah E. Hannula; Andrew Gordon; J. Daniel Ragland; Ana Maria Iosif; Marjorie Solomon Relational memory weakness in autism despite the use of a controlled encoding task Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–21, 2023. @article{Minor2023, Introduction: Recent work challenged past findings that documented relational memory impairments in autism. Previous studies often relied solely on explicit behavioral responses to assess relational memory integrity, but successful performance on behavioral tasks may rely on other cognitive abilities (e.g., executive functioning) that are impacted in some autistic individuals. Eye-tracking tasks do not require explicit behavioral responses, and, further, eye movements provide an indirect measure of memory. The current study examined whether memory-specific viewing patterns toward scenes differ between autistic and non-autistic individuals. Methods: Using a long-term memory paradigm that equated for complexity between item and relational memory tasks, participants studied a series of scenes. Following the initial study phase, scenes were re-presented, accompanied by an orienting question that directed participants to attend to either features of an item (i.e., in the item condition) or spatial relationships between items (i.e., in the relational condition) that might be subsequently modified during test. At test, participants viewed scenes that were unchanged (i.e., repeated from study), scenes that underwent an “item” modification (an exemplar switch) or a “relational” modification (a location switch), and scenes that had not been presented before. Eye movements were recorded throughout. Results: During study, there were no significant group differences in viewing directed to regions of scenes that might be manipulated at test, suggesting comparable processing of scene details during encoding. However, there was a group difference in explicit recognition accuracy for scenes that underwent a relational change. Marginal group differences in the expression of memory-based viewing effects during test for relational scenes were consistent with this behavioral outcome, particularly when analyses were limited to scenes recognized correctly with high confidence. Group differences were also evident in correlational analyses that examined the association between study phase viewing and recognition accuracy and between performance on the Picture Sequence Memory Test and recognition accuracy. Discussion: Together, our findings suggest differences in the integrity of relational memory representations and/or in the relationships between subcomponents of memory in autism. |
Miranda J. Munoz; Rishabh Arora; Yessenia M. Rivera; Quentin H. Drane; Gian D. Pal; Leo Verhagen Metman; Sepehr B. Sani; Joshua M. Rosenow; Lisa C. Goelz; Daniel M. Corcos; Fabian J. David In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Munoz2023, Background: Antiparkinson medication and subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS), two common treatments of Parkinson's disease (PD), effectively improve skeletomotor movements. However, evidence suggests that these treatments may have differential effects on eye and limb movements, although both movement types are controlled through the parallel basal ganglia loops. Objective: Using a task that requires both eye and upper limb movements, we aimed to determine the effects of medication and STN-DBS on eye and upper limb movement performance. Methods: Participants performed a visually-guided reaching task. We collected eye and upper limb movement data from participants with PD who were tested both OFF and ON medication (n = 34) or both OFF and ON bilateral STN-DBS while OFF medication (n = 11). We also collected data from older adult healthy controls (n = 14). Results: We found that medication increased saccade latency, while having no effect on reach reaction time (RT). Medication significantly decreased saccade peak velocity, while increasing reach peak velocity. We also found that bilateral STN-DBS significantly decreased saccade latency while having no effect on reach RT, and increased saccade and reach peak velocity. Finally, we found that there was a positive relationship between saccade latency and reach RT, which was unaffected by either treatment. Conclusion: These findings show that medication worsens saccade performance and benefits reaching performance, while STN-DBS benefits both saccade and reaching performance. We explore what the differential beneficial and detrimental effects on eye and limb movements suggest about the potential physiological changes occurring due to treatment. |
Nathan C. Foster; Simon J. Bennett; Kiri Pullar; Joe Causer; Cristina Becchio; Daniel P. Clowes; Spencer J. Hayes Observational learning of atypical biological kinematics in autism Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 16, no. 9, pp. 1799–1810, 2023. @article{Foster2023, Observing and voluntarily imitating the biological kinematics displayed by a model underpins the acquisition of new motor skills via sensorimotor processes linking perception with action. Differences in voluntary imitation in autism could be related to sensorimotor processing activity during action-observation of biological motion, as well as how sensorimotor integration processing occurs across imitation attempts. Using an observational practice protocol, which minimized the active contribution of the peripheral sensorimotor system, we examined the contribution of sensorimotor processing during action-observation. The data showed that autistic participants imitated both the temporal duration and atypical kinematic profile of the observed movement with a similar level of accuracy as neurotypical participants. These findings suggest the lower-level perception-action processes responsible for encoding biological kinematics during the action-observation phase of imitation are operational in autism. As there was no task-specific engagement of the peripheral sensorimotor system during observational practice, imitation difficulties in autism are most likely underpinned by sensorimotor integration issues related to the processing of efferent and (re)afferent sensorimotor information during trial-to-trial motor execution. |
Althea Frisanco; Marco Biella; Marco Brambilla; Mariska E. Kret All that meets the eye: The contribution of reward processing and pupil mimicry on pupillary reactions to facial trustworthiness Journal Article In: Current Psychology, vol. 42, no. 14, pp. 11685–11692, 2023. @article{Frisanco2023, The present work investigates pupillary reactions induced by exposure to faces with different levels of trustworthiness. Participants' (N = 69) pupillary changes were recorded while they viewed white male faces with a neutral expression varying on facial trustworthiness. Results suggest that reward processing and pupil mimicry are relevant mechanisms driving participants' pupil reactions. However, when including both factors in one statistical model, pupil mimicry seems to be a stronger predictor than reward processing of participants' pupil dilation. Results are discussed in light of pupillometry evidence. |
Simeng Gu; Yao Jiang; Mei Liu; Yumeng Li; Yuan Liang; Rou Feng; Minghong Xu; Fushun Wang; Jason H. Huang Eye movements and ERP biomarkers for face processing problems in avoidant attachment-style individuals Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Gu2023, Background: Avoidant attachment poses a serious risk to intimate relationships and offspring. However, there are few studies on the face-processing characteristics and impairments of avoidant individuals based on basic emotion theory. Therefore, this study investigated the issues of emotional processing and deactivation strategies in individuals with avoidant attachment. Methods: Avoidant and secure individuals were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment and a two-choice oddball task in which they had to distinguish facial expressions of basic emotions (sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral). Eye fixation durations to various parts of the face, including the eyes, nose, and mouth, were measured, and three event-related potentials (ERP) components (P100, N170, and P300) were monitored. Results: Avoidant individuals could not process facial expressions as easily as secure individuals. Avoidant individuals focused less on the eyes of angry faces when compared to secure individuals. They also exhibited a more positive P100 component and a less negative N170 component when processing faces and a larger amplitude of the P300 component than secure individuals when processing emotional expressions. Conclusion: Avoidant individuals use deactivating strategies and exhibit specific characteristics at different stages, which are of great significance in social interaction. |
J. Hartman; J. Saffran; R. Litovsky Word learning in deaf adults who use cochlear implants: The role of talker variability and attention to the mouth Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Hartman2023, OBJECTIVES: Although cochlear implants (CIs) facilitate spoken language acquisition, many CI listeners experience difficulty learning new words. Studies have shown 29that highly variable stimulus input and audiovisual cues improve speech perception in CI listeners. However, less is known whether these two factors improve perception in a word learning context. Furthermore, few studies have examined how CI listeners direct their gaze to efficiently capture visual information available on a talker's face. The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to examine whether talker variability could improve word learning in CI listeners and (2) to examine how CI listeners direct their gaze while viewing a talker speak. DESIGN: Eighteen adults with CIs and 10 adults with normal hearing (NH) learned eight novel word-object pairs spoken by a single talker or six different talkers (multiple talkers). The word learning task comprised of nonsense words following the phonotactic rules of English. Learning was probed using a novel talker in a two-alternative forced-choice eye gaze task. Learners' eye movements to the mouth and the target object (accuracy) were tracked over time. RESULTS: Both groups performed near ceiling during the test phase, regardless of whether they learned from the same talker or different talkers. However, compared to listeners with NH, CI listeners directed their gaze significantly more to the talker's mouth while learning the words. CONCLUSIONS: Unlike NH listeners who can successfully learn words without focusing on the talker's mouth, CI listeners tended to direct their gaze to the talker's mouth, which may facilitate learning. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that CI listeners use a visual processing strategy that efficiently captures redundant audiovisual speech cues available at the mouth. Due to ceiling effects, however, it is unclear whether talker variability facilitated word learning for adult CI listeners, an issue that should be addressed in future work using more difficult listening conditions. |
Kara Hawthorne; Susan J. Loveall In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 66, no. 9, pp. 3606–3621, 2023. @article{Hawthorne2023, Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, “she” could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic prominence on pronoun interpre-tation for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and TD. Method: Adults with IDD (n =28) andTD (n = 27) listened to ministories involving a pronoun with two potential antecedents that varied in syntactic, semantic, and prag-matic prominence. Subject/first-mentioned antecedents are more syntactically prominent than object antecedents. Semantic prominence was manipulated via verb transitivity: Subjects are more semantically prominent when the verb is highly transitive (e.g., “hit” vs. “see,” a low-transitivity verb for which the subject is merely experiencing the action). Pragmatic prominence was manipulated by placing pro-sodic focus on one of the two potential antecedents. Eye gaze to images represent-ing the potential antecedents was tracked as a measure of online processing. Responses to a follow-up pronoun interpretation question were also recorded. Results: Adults with TD used syntactic, semantic, and—in early processing— pragmatic prominence when interpreting ambiguous pronouns. Adults with IDD were sensitive to syntactic prominence but to a significantly lesser extent than their peers with TD. Conclusions: Pronouns are an integral part of everyday conversation, and when the conversational partners do not share common strategies to link ambiguous pronouns with their antecedents, misunderstandings will occur. Results show that adults with IDD only weakly share pronoun interpretation strategies with adults with TD, suggesting that pronouns may be an important focus for inter-vention for this population. |
Anne Sophie Hildebrand; Fabian Breuer; Elisabeth Johanna Leehr; Johannes B. Finke; Leandra Bucher; Tim Klucken; Udo Dannlowski; Kati Roesmann Inhibitory control and its modification in spider phobia – Study protocol for an antisaccade training trial Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Hildebrand2023, Objectives Inhibitory control deficits are considered a key pathogenic factor in anxiety disorders. To assess inhibitory control, the antisaccade task is a well-established measure that assesses antisaccade performance via latencies and error rates. The present study follows three aims: (1) to investigate inhibitory control via antisaccade latencies and errors in an antisaccade task, and their associations with multiple measures of fear in patients with spider phobia (SP) versus healthy controls (HC), (2) to investigate the modifiability of antisaccade performance via a fear-specific antisaccade training in patients with SP and HC, and (3) to explore associations between putative training-induced changes in antisaccade performance in SPs and changes in diverse measures of fear. Methods Towards aim 1, we assess antisaccade latencies (primary outcome) and error rates (secondary outcome) in an emotional antisaccade task. Further, the baseline assessment includes assessments of psychophysiological, behavioral, and psychometric indices of fear in patients with SP and HCs. To address aim 2, we compare effects of a fear-specific antisaccade training with effects of a prosaccade training as a control condition. The primary and secondary outcomes are reassessed at a post-1-assessment in both SPs and HCs. Aim 3 employs a cross-over design and is piloted in patients with SP, only. Towards this aim, primary and secondary outcomes, as well as psychophysiological, behavioral, and psychometric measures of fear are reassessed at a post-2-assessment after the second training block. Conclusion This study aims to better understand inhibitory control processes and their modifiability in spider phobia. If successful, antisaccade training may assist in the treatment of specific phobia by directly targeting the putative underlying inhibitory control deficits. This study has been preregistered with ISRCTN (ID: ISRCTN12918583) on 28th February 2022. |
Arthur Pabst; Zoé Bollen; Nicolas Masson; Pauline Billaux; Philippe Timary; Pierre Maurage An eye-tracking study of biased attentional processing of emotional faces in severe alcohol use disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 323, pp. 778–787, 2023. @article{Pabst2023, Background: Social cognition impairments in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) are increasingly established. However, fundamental aspects of social cognition, and notably the attentional processing of socio-affective information, remain unexplored, limiting our understanding of underlying mechanisms. Here, we determined whether patients with SAUD show attentional biases to specific socio-affective cues, namely emotional faces. Method: In a modified dot-probe paradigm, 30 patients with SAUD and 30 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) were presented with pairs of neutral-emotional (angry, disgusted, happy, sad) faces while having their eye movements recorded. Indices of early/automatic (first fixations, latency to first fixations) and later/controlled (number of fixations, dwell-time) processes were computed. Results: Patients with SAUD did not differ from HC in their attention to angry/disgusted/sad vs. neutral faces. However, patients with SAUD fixated/dwelled less on happy vs. neutral faces in the first block of stimuli than HC, who presented an attentional bias to happy faces. Limitations: Sample-size was determined to detect medium-to-large effects and subtler ones may have been missed. Further, our cross-sectional design provides no explanation as to whether the evidenced biases precede or are a consequence of SAUD. Conclusions: These results extend the social cognition literature in SAUD to the attentional domain, by evidencing the absence of a controlled attentional bias toward positive social cues in SAUD. This may reflect reduced sensitivity to social reward and could contribute to higher order social cognition difficulties and social dysfunction. |
Ashim Pandey; Sujaya Neupane; Srijana Adhikary; Keepa Vaidya; Christopher C. Pack Cortical visual impairment at birth can be improved rapidly by vision training in adulthood: A case study Journal Article In: Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, vol. 40, no. 4-6, pp. 261–270, 2023. @article{Pandey2023, Background: Cortical visual impairment (CVI) is a severe loss of visual function caused by damage to the visual cortex or its afferents, often as a consequence of hypoxic insults during birth. It is one of the leading causes of vision loss in children, and it is most often permanent. Objective: Several studies have demonstrated limited vision restoration in adults who trained on well-controlled psychophysical tasks, after acquiring CVI late in life. Other studies have shown improvements in children who underwent vision training. However, little is known about the prospects for the large number of patients who acquired CVI at birth but received no formal therapy as children. Methods: We, therefore, conducted a proof-of-principle study in one CVI patient long after the onset of cortical damage (age 18), to test the training speed, efficacy and generalizability of vision rehabilitation using protocols that had previously proven successful in adults. The patient trained at home and in the laboratory, on a psychophysical task that required discrimination of complex motion stimuli presented in the blind field. Visual function was assessed before and after training, using perimetric measures, as well as a battery of psychophysical tests. Results: The patient showed remarkably rapid improvements on the training task, with performance going from chance to 80% correct over the span of 11 sessions. With further training, improved vision was found for untrained stimuli and for perimetric measures of visual sensitivity. Some, but not all, of these performance gains were retained upon retesting after one year. Conclusions: These results suggest that existing vision rehabilitation programs can be highly effective in adult patients who acquired CVI at a young age. Validation with a large sample size is critical, and future work should also focus on improving the usability and accessibility of these programs for younger patients. |
Ashley C. Parr; Heidi C. Riek; Brian C. Coe; Giovanna Pari; Mario Masellis; Connie Marras; Douglas P. Munoz Genetic variation in the dopamine system is associated with mixed-strategy decision-making in patients with Parkinson's disease Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 58, no. 12, pp. 4523–4544, 2023. @article{Parr2023, Decision-making during mixed-strategy games requires flexibly adapting choice strategies in response to others' actions and dynamically tracking outcomes. Such decisions involve diverse cognitive processes, including reinforcement learning, which are affected by disruptions to the striatal dopamine system. We therefore investigated how genetic variation in dopamine function affected mixed-strategy decision-making in Parkinson's disease (PD), which involves striatal dopamine pathology. Sixty-six PD patients (ages 49–85, Hoehn and Yahr Stages 1–3) and 22 healthy controls (ages 54–75) competed in a mixed-strategy game where successful performance depended on minimizing choice biases (i.e., flexibly adapting choices trial by trial). Participants also completed a fixed-strategy task that was matched for sensory input, motor outputs and overall reward rate. Factor analyses were used to disentangle cognitive from motor aspects within both tasks. Using a within-subject, multi-centre design, patients were examined on and off dopaminergic therapy, and genetic variation was examined via a multilocus genetic profile score representing the additive effects of three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that influence dopamine transmission: rs4680 (COMT Val158Met), rs6277 (C957T) and rs907094 (encoding DARPP-32). PD and control participants displayed comparable mixed-strategy choice behaviour (overall); however, PD patients with genetic profile scores indicating higher dopamine transmission showed improved performance relative to those with low scores. Exploratory follow-up tests across individual SNPs revealed better performance in individuals with the C957T polymorphism, reflecting higher striatal D2/D3 receptor density. Importantly, genetic variation modulated cognitive aspects of performance, above and beyond motor function, suggesting that genetic variation in dopamine signalling may underlie individual differences in cognitive function in PD. |
Yair Pinto; Maria Chiara Villa; Sabrina Siliquini; Gabriele Polonara; Claudia Passamonti; Simona Lattanzi; Nicoletta Foschi; Mara Fabri; Edward H. F. Haan Visual integration across fixation: Automatic processes are split but conscious processes remain unified in the split-brain Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–8, 2023. @article{Pinto2023, The classic view holds that when “split-brain” patients are presented with an object in the right visual field, they will correctly identify it verbally and with the right hand. However, when the object is presented in the left visual field, the patient verbally states that he saw nothing but nevertheless identifies it accurately with the left hand. This interaction suggests that perception, recognition and responding are separated in the two isolated hemispheres. However, there is now accumulating evidence that this interaction is not absolute; for instance, split-brain patients are able to detect and localise stimuli anywhere in the visual field verbally and with either hand. In this study we set out to explore this cross-hemifield interaction in more detail with the split-brain patient DDC and carried out two experiments. The aim of these experiments is to unveil the unity of deliberate and automatic processing in the context of visual integration across hemispheres. Experiment 1 suggests that automatic processing is split in this context. In contrast, when the patient is forced to adopt a conscious, deliberate, approach, processing seemed to be unified across visual fields (and thus across hemispheres). First, we looked at the confidence that DDC has in his responses. The experiment involved a simultaneous “same” versus “different” matching task with two shapes presented either within one hemifield or across fixation. The results showed that we replicated the observation that split brain patients cannot match across fixation, but more interesting, that DDC was very confident in the across-fixation condition while performing at chance-level. On the basis of this result, we hypothesised a two-route explanation. In healthy subjects, the visual information from the two hemifields is integrated in an automatic, unconscious fashion via the intact splenium, and this route has been severed in DDC. However, we know from previous experiments that some transfer of information remains possible. We proposed that this second route (perhaps less visual; more symbolic) may become apparent when he is forced to use a deliberate, consciously controlled approach. In an experiment where he is informed, by a second stimulus presented in one hemifield, what to do with the first stimulus that was presented in the same or the opposite hemifield, we showed that there was indeed interhemispheric transfer of information. We suggest that this two-route model may help in clarifying some of the controversial issues in split-brain research. |
Barbara L. Pitts; Michelle L. Eisenberg; Heather R. Bailey; Jeffrey M. Zacks Cueing natural event boundaries improves memory in people with post-traumatic stress disorder Journal Article In: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Pitts2023, People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called event segmentation. Here, we investigated the causal relationship between event segmentation and memory by cueing event boundaries and evaluating its effect on subsequent memory in people with PTSD. People with PTSD (n = 38) and trauma-matched controls (n = 36) watched and remembered videos of everyday activities that were either unedited, contained visual and auditory cues at event boundaries, or contained visual and auditory cues at event middles. PTSD symptom severity varied substantial within both the group with a PTSD diagnosis and the control group. Memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, but people with high symptoms of PTSD remembered fewer details from the videos than those with lower symptoms of PTSD. Both those with PTSD and controls remembered more information from the videos in the event boundary cue condition than the middle cue or unedited conditions. This finding has important implications for translational work focusing on addressing everyday memory complaints in people with PTSD. |
Sotiris Plainis; Emmanouil Ktistakis; Miltiadis K. Tsilimbaris Presbyopia correction with multifocal contact lenses: Evaluation of silent reading performance using eye movements analysis Journal Article In: Contact Lens and Anterior Eye, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 1–8, 2023. @article{Plainis2023, Purpose: Many activities of daily living rely on reading, thus is not surprising that complaints from presbyopes originate in reading difficulties rather in visual acuity. Here, the effectiveness of presbyopia correction with multifocal contact lenses (CLs) is evaluated using an eye-fixation based method of silent reading performance. Μethods: Visual performance of thirty presbyopic volunteers (age: 50 ± 5 yrs) was assessed monocularly and binocularly following 15 days of wear of monthly disposable CLs (AIR OPTIX™ plus HydraGlyde™, Alcon Laboratories) with: (a) single vision (SV) lenses – uncorrected for near (b) aspheric multifocal (MF) CLs. LogMAR acuity was measured with ETDRS charts. Reading performance was evaluated using standard IReST paragraphs displayed on a screen (0.4 logMAR print size at 40 cm distance). Eye movements were monitored with an infrared eyetracker (Eye-Link II, SR Research Ltd). Data analysis included computation of reading speed, fixation duration, fixations per word and percentage of regressions. Results: Average reading speed was 250 ± 68 and 235 ± 70 wpm, binocularly and monocularly, with SV CLs, improving statistically significantly to 280 ± 67 (p = 0.002) and 260 ± 59 wpm (p = 0.01), respectively, with MF CLs. Moreover, fixation duration, fixations per word and ex-Gaussian parameter of fixation duration, μ, showed a statistically significant improvement when reading with MF CLs, with fixation duration exhibiting the stronger correlation (r = 0.79, p < 0.001) with improvement in reading speed. The correlation between improvement in VA and reading speed was moderate (r = 0.46 |
Iván Plaza-Rosales; Enzo Brunetti; Rodrigo Montefusco-Siegmund; Samuel Madariaga; Rodrigo Hafelin; Daniela P. Ponce; María Isabel Behrens; Pedro E. Maldonado; Andrea Paula-Lima Visual-spatial processing impairment in the occipital-frontal connectivity network at early stages of Alzheimer's disease Journal Article In: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, vol. 15, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{PlazaRosales2023, Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia worldwide, but its pathophysiological phenomena are not fully elucidated. Many neurophysiological markers have been suggested to identify early cognitive impairments of AD. However, the diagnosis of this disease remains a challenge for specialists. In the present cross-sectional study, our objective was to evaluate the manifestations and mechanisms underlying visual-spatial deficits at the early stages of AD. Methods: We combined behavioral, electroencephalography (EEG), and eye movement recordings during the performance of a spatial navigation task (a virtual version of the Morris Water Maze adapted to humans). Participants (69–88 years old) with amnesic mild cognitive impairment–Clinical Dementia Rating scale (aMCI–CDR 0.5) were selected as probable early AD (eAD) by a neurologist specialized in dementia. All patients included in this study were evaluated at the CDR 0.5 stage but progressed to probable AD during clinical follow-up. An equal number of matching healthy controls (HCs) were evaluated while performing the navigation task. Data were collected at the Department of Neurology of the Clinical Hospital of the Universidad de Chile and the Department of Neuroscience of the Faculty of Universidad de Chile. Results: Participants with aMCI preceding AD (eAD) showed impaired spatial learning and their visual exploration differed from the control group. eAD group did not clearly prefer regions of interest that could guide solving the task, while controls did. The eAD group showed decreased visual occipital evoked potentials associated with eye fixations, recorded at occipital electrodes. They also showed an alteration of the spatial spread of activity to parietal and frontal regions at the end of the task. The control group presented marked occipital activity in the beta band (15–20 Hz) at early visual processing time. The eAD group showed a reduction in beta band functional connectivity in the prefrontal cortices reflecting poor planning of navigation strategies. Discussion: We found that EEG signals combined with visual-spatial navigation analysis, yielded early and specific features that may underlie the basis for understanding the loss of functional connectivity in AD. Still, our results are clinically promising for early diagnosis required to improve quality of life and decrease healthcare costs. |
Brendan L. Portengen; Marnix Naber; Giorgio L. Porro; Douwe Bergsma; Evert J. Veldman; Saskia M. Imhof In: Eye and Brain, vol. 15, pp. 77–89, 2023. @article{Portengen2023a, Purpose: We improve pupillary responses and diagnostic performance of flicker pupil perimetry through alterations in global and local color contrast and luminance contrast in adult patients suffering from visual field defects due to cerebral visual impairment (CVI). Methods: Two experiments were conducted on patients with CVI (Experiment 1: 19 subjects, age M and SD 57.9 ± 14.0; Experiment 2: 16 subjects, age M and SD 57.3 ± 14.7) suffering from absolute homonymous visual field (VF) defects. We altered global color contrast (stimuli consisted of white, yellow, cyan and yellow-equiluminant-to-cyan colored wedges) in Experiment 1, and we manipulated luminance and local color contrast with bright and dark yellow and multicolor wedges in a 2-by-2 design in Experiment 2. Stimuli consecutively flickered across 44 stimulus locations within the inner 60 degrees of the VF and were offset to a contrasting (opponency colored) dark background. Pupil perimetry results were compared to standard automated perimetry (SAP) to assess diagnostic accuracy. Results: A bright stimulus with global color contrast using yellow (p= 0.009) or white (p= 0.006) evoked strongest pupillary responses as opposed to stimuli containing local color contrast and lower brightness. Diagnostic accuracy, however, was similar across global color contrast conditions in Experiment 1 (p= 0.27) and decreased when local color contrast and less luminance contrast was introduced in Experiment 2 (p= 0.02). The bright yellow condition resulted in highest performance (AUC M = 0.85 ± 0.10 |
Sabina Poudel; Jianzhong Jin; Hamed Rahimi-Nasrabadi; Stephen Dellostritto; Mitchell W. Dul; Suresh Viswanathan; Jose-Manuel Alonso Contrast sensitivity of ON and OFF human retinal pathways in myopia Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Poudel2023, The human visual cortex processes light and dark stimuli with ON and OFF pathways that are differently modulated by luminance contrast. We have previously demonstrated that ON cortical pathways have higher contrast sensitivity than OFF cortical pathways and the difference increases with luminance range (defined as the maximum minus minimum luminance in the scene). Here, we demonstrate that these ON-OFF cortical differences are already present in the human retina and that retinal responses measured with electroretinography are more affected by reductions in luminance range than cortical responses measured with electroencephalography. Moreover, we show that ON-OFF pathway differences measured with electroretinography become more pronounced in myopia, a visual disorder that elongates the eye and blurs vision at far distance. We find that, as the eye axial length increases across subjects, ON retinal pathways become less responsive, slower in response latency, less sensitive, and less effective and slower at driving pupil constriction. Based on these results, we conclude that myopia is associated with a deficit in ON pathway function that decreases the ability of the retina to process low contrast and regulate retinal illuminance in bright environments. Significance Statement Contrast sensitivity is an important visual function that allows discriminating faint visual targets slightly lighter or darker than the background. We have previously demonstrated that ON and OFF cortical pathways signaling light and dark stimuli have different contrast sensitivity and the difference increases with luminance range. Here, we demonstrate that these ON-OFF sensitivity differences are inherited from the retina and are affected by myopia (nearsightedness), a visual disorder that blurs vision at far distances and is becoming a world epidemic. We show that myopia is associated with a retinal deficit that makes ON pathways less effective at signaling contrast and regulating retinal illuminance. These results could have clinical implications and may lead to novel approaches for myopia control. |
Sophia Antonia Press; Stefanie C. Biehl; Gregor Domes; Jennifer Svaldi; Sophia Antonia Press; Stefanie C. Biehl; Gregor Domes; Jennifer Svaldi; Sophia Antonia Press Increased insula and amygdala activity during selective attention for negatively valenced body parts in binge eating disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, vol. 132, no. 1, pp. 63–77, 2023. @article{Press2023, Previous studies indicate that participants with eating disorders show an attentional bias for the negatively valenced body parts of their own body. However, the neural basis underlying these processes has not been investigated. We conducted a preregistered combined functional MRI (fMRI)/eye tracking study and presented 35 women with binge eating disorder (BED) and 24 weight-matched control subjects (CG) with body part images of their own body and a weight-matched unknown body. After the fMRI examination, participants rated the attractiveness of the presented body parts. As expected, women with BED responded with significantly higher insula and amygdala activity when viewing the negatively valenced body parts of their own body (compared to all other combinations). However, individuals with BED did not deviate from the CG in the processing of these stimuli in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the extrastriate body area or the fusiform body area. Our results indicate that the negative valued body parts carry a particularly strong emotional valence in individuals with BED. These results further emphasize the relevance of processing bias for negatively valenced body parts in the pathology of BED. |
Aida Rahavi; Manuela Malaspina; Andrea Albonico; Jason J. S. Barton “Looking at nothing”: An implicit ocular motor index of face recognition in developmental prosopagnosia Journal Article In: Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 59–70, 2023. @article{Rahavi2023, Subjects often look towards to previous location of a stimulus related to a task even when that stimulus is no longer visible. In this study we asked whether this effect would be preserved or reduced in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia. Participants learned faces presented in video-clips and then saw a brief montage of four faces, which was replaced by a screen with empty boxes, at which time they indicated whether the learned face had been present in the montage. Control subjects were more likely to look at the blank location where the learned face had appeared, on both hit and miss trials, though the effect was larger on hit trials. Prosopagnosic subjects showed a reduced effect, though still better on hit than on miss trials. We conclude that explicit accuracy and our implicit looking at nothing effect are parallel effects reflecting the strength of the neural activity underlying face recognition. |
Isabel Raposo; Sara M. Szczepanski; Kathleen Haaland; Tor Endestad; Anne Kristin Solbakk; Robert T. Knight; Randolph F. Helfrich Periodic attention deficits after frontoparietal lesions provide causal evidence for rhythmic attentional sampling Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 33, no. 22, pp. 4893–4904, 2023. @article{Raposo2023, Contemporary models conceptualize spatial attention as a blinking spotlight that sequentially samples visual space. Hence, behavior fluctuates over time, even in states of presumed “sustained” attention. Recent evidence has suggested that rhythmic neural activity in the frontoparietal network constitutes the functional basis of rhythmic attentional sampling. However, causal evidence to support this notion remains absent. Using a lateralized spatial attention task, we addressed this issue in patients with focal lesions in the frontoparietal attention network. Our results revealed that frontoparietal lesions introduce periodic attention deficits, i.e., temporally specific behavioral deficits that are aligned with the underlying neural oscillations. Attention-guided perceptual sensitivity was on par with that of healthy controls during optimal phases but was attenuated during the less excitable sub-cycles. Theta-dependent sampling (3–8 Hz) was causally dependent on the prefrontal cortex, while high-alpha/low-beta sampling (8–14 Hz) emerged from parietal areas. Collectively, our findings reveal that lesion-induced high-amplitude, low-frequency brain activity is not epiphenomenal but has immediate behavioral consequences. More generally, these results provide causal evidence for the hypothesis that the functional architecture of attention is inherently rhythmic. |
Jaakko Hotta; Jukka Saari; Hanna Harno; Eija Kalso; Nina Forss; Riitta Hari Somatotopic disruption of the functional connectivity of the primary sensorimotor cortex in complex regional pain syndrome type 1 Journal Article In: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 44, no. 17, pp. 6258–6274, 2023. @article{Hotta2023, In complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), the representation area of the affected limb in the primary sensorimotor cortex (SM1) reacts abnormally during sensory stimulation and motor actions. We recorded 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging resting-state data from 17 upper-limb CRPS type 1 patients and 19 healthy control subjects to identify alterations of patients' SM1 function during spontaneous pain and to find out how the spatial distribution of these alterations were related to peripheral symptoms. Seed-based correlations and independent component analyses indicated that patients' upper-limb SM1 representation areas display (i) reduced interhemispheric connectivity, associated with the combined effect of intensity and spatial extent of limb pain, (ii) increased connectivity with the right anterior insula that positively correlated with the duration of CRPS, (iii) increased connectivity with periaqueductal gray matter, and (iv) disengagement from the other parts of the SM1 network. These findings, now reported for the first time in CRPS, parallel the alterations found in patients suffering from other chronic pain conditions or from limb denervation; they also agree with findings in healthy persons who are exposed to experimental pain or have used their limbs asymmetrically. Our results suggest that CRPS is associated with a sustained and somatotopically specific alteration of SM1 function, that has correspondence to the spatial distribution of the peripheral manifestations and to the duration of the syndrome. |
Monja Hoven; Alejandro Hirmas; Jan Engelmann; Ruth Holst The role of attention in decision-making under risk in gambling disorder: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Addictive Behaviors, vol. 138, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Hoven2023, Gambling disorder (GD) is a behavioural addiction characterized by impairments in decision-making, favouring risk- and reward-prone choices. One explanatory factor for this behaviour is a deviation in attentional processes, as increasing evidence indicates that GD patients show an attentional bias toward gambling stimuli. However, previous attentional studies have not directly investigated attention during risky decision-making. 26 patients with GD and 29 healthy matched controls (HC) completed a mixed gambles task combined with eye-tracking to investigate attentional biases for potential gains versus losses during decision-making under risk. Results indicate that compared to HC, GD patients gambled more and were less loss averse. GD patients did not show a direct attentional bias towards gains (or relative to losses). Using a recent (neuro)economics model that considers average attention and trial-wise deviations in average attention, we conducted fine-grained exploratory analyses of the attentional data. Results indicate that the average attention for gains in GD patients moderated the effect of gain value on gambling choices, whereas this was not the case for HC. GD patients with high average attention for gains started gambling at less high gain values. A similar trend-level effect was found for losses, where GD patients with high average attention for losses stopped gambling at lower loss values. This study gives more insight into how attentional processes in GD play a role in gambling behaviour, which could have implications for the development of future treatments focusing on attentional training or for the development of interventions that increase the salience of losses. |
Yiru Huang; Zitian Liu; Zidong Chen; Zongyi Zhan; Le Gao; Jingyi Hu; Yanyan Wu; Fang-Fang Yan; Daming Deng; Chang-Bing Huang; Minbin Yu Visual crowding reveals field- and axis-specific cortical miswiring after long-term axial misalignment in strabismic patients without amblyopia Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Huang2023, PURPOSE. Inspired by physiological and neuroimaging findings that revealed squint- induced modification of cortical volume and visual receptive field in early visual areas, we hypothesized that strabismic eyes without amblyopia manifest an increase in critical spacing of visual crowding, an essential bottleneck on object recognition and reliable psychophysical index of cortical organization. METHODS. We used real-time eye tracking to ensure gaze-contingent display and examined visual crowding in patients with horizontal concomitant strabismus (both esotropia and exotropia) but without amblyopia and age-matched normal controls. RESULTS. Nineteen patients with exotropia (12 men, mean ± SD = 22.89 ± 7.82 years), matched normal controls (7 men, mean ± SD = 23.07 ± 1.07 years) participated in this 21 patients with esotropia (10 men, mean ± SD = 23.48 ± 6.95 years), and 14 age- study. We found that patients with strabismus without amblyopia showed significantly larger critical spacing with nasotemporal asymmetry in only the radial axis that related to the strabismus pattern, with exotropia exhibiting stronger temporal hemifield crowding and esotropia exhibiting stronger nasal hemifield crowding, in both the deviated and fixating eyes. Moreover, the magnitude of crowding change was related to the duration and degree of strabismic deviation. CONCLUSIONS. Using visual crowding as a psychophysical index of cortical organization, our study demonstrated significantly greater peripheral visual crowding with nasotemporal asymmetry in only the radial axis in patients with strabismus without amblyopia, indicating the existence of hemifield- and axis-specific miswiring of cortical processing in object recognition induced by long-term adaptation to ocular misalignment. |
Yiru Huang; Zitian Liu; Mingqin Wang; Le Gao; Yanyan Wu; Jingyi Hu; Zhenyu Zhang; Fang-Fang Yan; Daming Deng; Chang-Bing Huang; Minbin Yu Cortical reorganization after optical alignment in strabismic patients outside of critical period Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 64, no. 11, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Huang2023f, PURPOSE. To measure visual crowding, an essential bottleneck on object recognition and reliable psychophysical index of cortex organization, in older children and adults with horizontal concomitant strabismus before and after strabismus surgery. METHODS. Using real-time eye tracking to ensure gaze-contingent display, we examined the peripheral visual crowding effects in older children and adults with horizontal concomitant strabismus but without amblyopia before and after strabismus surgery. Patients were asked to discriminate the orientation of the central tumbling E target letter with flankers arranged along the radial or tangential axis in the nasal or temporal hemifield at different eccentricities (5° or 10°). The critical spacing value, which is the minimum space between the target and the flankers required for correct discrimination, was obtained for comparisons before and after strabismus surgery. RESULTS. Twelve individuals with exotropia (6 males, 21.75 ± 7.29 years, mean ± SD) and 15 individuals with esotropia (6 males, 24.13 ± 5.96 years) participated in this study. We found that strabismic individuals showed significantly larger critical spacing with nasotemporal asymmetry along the radial axis that related to the strabismus pattern, with exotropes exhibiting stronger temporal field crowding and esotropes exhibiting stronger nasal field crowding before surgical alignment. After surgery, the critical spacing was reduced and rebalanced between the nasal and temporal hemifields. Furthermore, the postoperative recovery of stereopsis was associated with the extent of nasotemporal balance of critical spacing. CONCLUSIONS. We find that optical realignment (i.e., strabismus surgery) can normalize the enlarged visual crowding effects, a reliable psychophysical index of cortical organization, in the peripheral visual field of older children and adults with strabismus and rebalance the nasotemporal asymmetry of crowding, promoting the recovery of postoperative stereopsis. Our results indicated a potential of experience-dependent cortical organization after axial alignment even for individuals who are out of the critical period of visual development, illuminating the capacity and limitations of optics on sensory plasticity and emphasizing the importance of ocular correction for clinical practice. |
Falk Huettig; Cesko C. Voeten; Esther Pascual; Junying Liang; Florian Hintz Do autistic children differ in language-mediated prediction? Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 239, pp. 1–7, 2023. @article{Huettig2023, Prediction appears to be an important characteristic of the human mind. It has also been suggested that prediction is a core difference of autistic1 children. Past research exploring language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children, however, has been somewhat contradictory, with some studies finding normal anticipatory processing in autistic children with low levels of autistic traits but others observing weaker prediction effects in autistic children with less receptive language skills. Here we investigated language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in young children who differed in the severity of their level of autistic traits and were in professional institutional care in Hangzhou, China. We chose the same spoken sentences (translated into Mandarin Chinese) and visual stimuli as a previous study which observed robust prediction effects in young children (Mani & Huettig, 2012) and included a control group of typically-developing children. Typically developing but not autistic children showed robust prediction effects. Most interestingly, autistic children with lower communication, motor, and (adaptive) behavior scores exhibited both less predictive and non-predictive visual attention behavior. Our results raise the possibility that differences in language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children with higher levels of autistic traits may be differences in visual attention in disguise, a hypothesis that needs further investigation. |
Aoife M. L. Hunter; Roger S. Anderson; Tony Redmond; David F. Garway-Heath; Pádraig J. Mulholland Investigating the spatiotemporal summation of perimetric stimuli in dry age-related macular degeneration Journal Article In: Translational Vision Science & Technology, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Hunter2023, Purpose: To measure achromatic spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal summation in dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to healthy controls under conditions of photopic gaze-contingent perimetry. Methods: Twenty participants with dry AMD (mean age, 74.6 years) and 20 healthy controls (mean age, 67.8 years) performed custom, gaze-contingent perimetry tests. An area-modulation test generated localized estimates of Ricco's area (RA) at 2.5° and 5° eccentricities along the 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270° meridians. Contrast thresholds were measured at the same test locations for stimuli of six durations (3.7–190.4 ms) with a Goldmann III stimulus (GIII, 0.43°) and RA-scaled stimuli. The upper limit (critical duration) of complete temporal summation (using the GIII stimulus) and spatiotempo-ral summation (using the RA stimuli) was estimated using iterative two-phase regression analysis. Results: Median (interquartile range [IQR]) RA estimates were significantly larger in AMD participants (2.5°: 0.21 [0.09–0.41] deg2; 5°: 0.32 [0.15–0.65 deg2 ]) compared to healthy controls (2.5°: 0.08 [0.05–0.13] deg2; 5°: 0.15 [0.08–0.22] deg2 ) at all test locations (all P < 0.05). No significant difference in median critical duration was found in AMD participants with the GIII stimulus (19.6 [9.9–30.4] ms) and RA-scaled stimuli (22.9 [13.9–40.3] ms) compared to healthy controls (GIII: 17.0 [11.3–24.0] ms; RA-scaled: 22.4 [14.3–33.1] ms) at all test locations (all P > 0.05). Conclusions: Spatial summation is altered in dry AMD, without commensurate changes in temporal summation. Translational Relevance: The sensitivity of perimetry to AMD may be improved by utilizing stimuli that probe alterations in spatial summation in the disease. |
Yi-Ting Jhang; Chi-Wen Liang The effect of uncertainty on attentional bias in subclinical worriers: Evidence from reaction time and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, vol. 81, pp. 1–7, 2023. @article{Jhang2023, Background and objectives: High-worry individuals have been assumed to show attentional bias towards threat, particularly under high uncertainty. This study experimentally investigated the effect of uncertainty on attentional bias in subclinical worriers. Methods: A visual dot-probe task combined with eye-tracking was used to assess participants' attentional bias towards blurred and unfiltered stimuli. Fifty high-worry and 47 low-worry participants were randomly assigned to either the high- or low-uncertainty threat condition. Aversive noise bursts were delivered either unpredictably (the high-uncertainty threat condition) or predictably (the low-uncertainty threat condition) during the visual dot-probe task. Results: In the low-uncertainty threat condition, high-worry participants exhibited enhanced attentional engagement towards blurred pictures compared to low-worry participants. They also had shorter initial fixation latencies on blurred pictures than on unfiltered pictures. In the high-uncertainty threat condition, high-worry participants demonstrated more difficulty in disengaging from threatening pictures compared to low-worry participants. Limitation: First, this study used a nonclinical sample. Second, the power was limited with regard to the analysis of eye-movement data. Third, anxiety and worry induced by noise bursts were measured using subjective rating scales only. Fourth, some picture characteristics, such as luminosity and complexity, were not controlled. Finally, uncertainty related to delivery of noise bursts and pictures were both manipulated dichotomously. Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of uncertainty in the maintenance of attentional bias towards threat-related pictures in high-worry individuals. |
Brandon Keehn; Girija Kadlaskar; Rebecca McNally Keehn Elevated and accelerated: Locus coeruleus activity and visual search abilities in autistic children Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 169, pp. 118–129, 2023. @article{Keehn2023, Background: Autistic individuals excel at visual search, however, the neural mechanism(s) underlying this advantage remain unclear. The locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system, which plays a critical role in sensory perception and selective attention, has been shown to function in a persistently elevated state in individuals on the spectrum. However, the relationship between elevated tonic LC-NE activity and accelerated search in autism has not been explored. Objective: To examine the relationship between visual search abilities and resting pupil diameter (an indirect measure of tonic LC-NE activation) in autistic and neurotypical children. Methods: Participants were 24 school-aged autistic children and 24 age- and IQ-matched neurotypical children aged 8–15 years. Children completed two tasks: a resting eye-tracking task and a visual search paradigm. For the resting eye-tracking task, pupil diameter was monitored while participants fixated a central crosshair. For the visual search paradigm, participants were instructed to find the target (vertical line) embedded within an array of tilted (10°) distractor lines. The target was present on 50% of trials, and displayed within set sizes of 18, 24, and 36 items. Results: Consistent with previous studies, autistic children had significantly larger resting pupil size and searched faster and more efficiently compared to their neurotypical peers. Eye-tracking findings revealed that accelerated search was associated with fewer, not shorter, fixations in the autism group. Autistic children also showed reduced leftward search bias. Larger resting pupil size, indicative of increased tonic activation of the LC-NE system, was associated with greater search efficiency, longer fixation durations, and reduced leftward bias. Finally, within both groups reduced leftward bias was associated with increased autism symptomatology. Discussion: Together, these findings add to the existing body of research highlighting superior search in autism, suggest that elevated tonic LC-NE activity may contribute to more efficient search, and link non-social visual-spatial processing strengths to autism symptoms. |
Hyung Cho Kim; Claire M. Kaplan; Samiha Islam; Allegra S. Anderson; Megan E. Piper; Daniel E. Bradford; John J. Curtin; Kathryn A. DeYoung; Jason F. Smith; Andrew S. Fox; Alexander J. Shackman Acute nicotine abstinence amplifies subjective withdrawal symptoms and threat-evoked fear and anxiety, but not extended amygdala reactivity Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–31, 2023. @article{Kim2023a, Tobacco smoking imposes a staggering burden on public health, underscoring the urgency of developing a deeper understanding of the processes that maintain addiction. Clinical and experience-sampling data highlight the importance of anxious withdrawal symptoms, but the underlying neurobiology has remained elusive. Mechanistic work in animals implicates the central extended amygdala (EAc)—including the central nucleus of the amygdala and the neighboring bed nucleus of the stria terminalis—but the translational relevance of these discoveries remains unexplored. Here we leveraged a randomized trial design, well-established threat-anticipation paradigm, and multidimensional battery of assessments to understand the consequences of 24-hour nicotine abstinence. The threat-anticipation paradigm had the expected consequences, amplifying subjective distress and arousal, and recruiting the canonical threat-anticipation network. Abstinence increased smoking urges and withdrawal symptoms, and potentiated threat-evoked distress, but had negligible consequences for EAc threat reactivity, raising questions about the translational relevance of prominent animal and human models of addiction. These observations provide a framework for conceptualizing nicotine abstinence and withdrawal, with implications for basic, translational, and clinical science. |
Matthew Kimble; Olivia Cappello; Kevin Fleming Hypervigilance and depression as predictors of eye tracking to ambiguous pictures in trauma survivors Journal Article In: International Journal of Psychophysiology, vol. 187, pp. 27–33, 2023. @article{Kimble2023, Hypervigilance, attentional bias, and negative views of the world play a significant role in post trauma symptomatology and can be associated with both clinical depression and posttraumatic stress. However, both theory and research suggest there may be discernible differences in attentional patterns between these two outcomes. While depression may be associated with a general negativity bias, posttraumatic stress may be specifically associated with visual scanning, hypervigilance, and threat detection. In this study, seventy-seven community trauma survivors completed self-assessments for hypervigilance, depression, and posttraumatic cognitions and then had their eyes tracked while looking at a series of thirty neutral but ambiguous and complex pictures on a computer screen. Mean age of the sample was 36.3 with 52 % of the sample identifying as female. We found that hypervigilance scores and negative views of the world predicted both the number of fixations and area of the picture covered. These factors did not predict pupil size. These findings suggest that there are discernable gaze patterns after trauma associated with posttraumatic stress but not depression. Specifically, ambiguous pictures generate more fixations and scanning that is associated with vigilance but not depression. |
Kelsey E. Klein; Elizabeth A. Walker; Bob McMurray In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 338–357, 2023. @article{Klein2023a, Objective: The objective of this study was to characterize the dynamics of real-time lexical access, including lexical competition among phonologically similar words, and spreading semantic activation in school-age children with hearing aids (HAs) and children with cochlear implants (CIs). We hypothesized that developing spoken language via degraded auditory input would lead children with HAs or CIs to adapt their approach to spoken word recognition, especially by slowing down lexical access. Design: Participants were children ages 9- to 12-years old with normal hearing (NH), HAs, or CIs. Participants completed a Visual World Paradigm task in which they heard a spoken word and selected the matching picture from four options. Competitor items were either phonologically similar, semantically similar, or unrelated to the target word. As the target word unfolded, children's fixations to the target word, cohort competitor, rhyme competitor, semantically related item, and unrelated item were recorded as indices of ongoing lexical access and spreading semantic activation. Results: Children with HAs and children with CIs showed slower fixations to the target, reduced fixations to the cohort competitor, and increased fixations to the rhyme competitor, relative to children with NH. This wait-and-see profile was more pronounced in the children with CIs than the children with HAs. Children with HAs and children with CIs also showed delayed fixations to the semantically related item, although this delay was attributable to their delay in activating words in general, not to a distinct semantic source. Conclusions: Children with HAs and children with CIs showed qualitatively similar patterns of real-time spoken word recognition. Findings suggest that developing spoken language via degraded auditory input causes long-term cognitive adaptations to how listeners recognize spoken words, regardless of the type of hearing device used. Delayed lexical access directly led to delays in spreading semantic activation in children with HAs and CIs. This delay in semantic processing may impact these children's ability to understand connected speech in everyday life. |
Emily J. Knight; Edward G. Freedman; Evan J. Myers; Alaina S. Berruti; Leona A. Oakes; Cody Zhewei Cao; Sophie Molholm; John J. Foxe Severely attenuated visual feedback processing in children on the autism spectrum Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 13, pp. 2424–2438, 2023. @article{Knight2023, Individuals on the autism spectrum often exhibit atypicality in their sensory perception, but the neural underpinnings of these perceptual differences remain incompletely understood. One proposed mechanism is an imbalance in higher-order feedback re-entrant inputs to early sensory cortices during sensory perception, leading to increased propensity to focus on local object features over global context. We explored this theory by measuring visual evoked potentials during contour integration as considerable work has revealed that these processes are largely driven by feedback inputs from higher-order ventral visual stream regions. We tested the hypothesis that autistic individuals would have attenuated evoked responses to illusory contours compared with neurotypical controls. Electrophysiology was acquired while 29 autistic and 31 neurotypical children (7-17 years old, inclusive of both males and females) passively viewed a random series of Kanizsa figure stimuli, each consisting of four inducers that were aligned either at random rotational angles or such that contour integration would form an illusory square. Autistic children demonstrated attenuated automatic contour integration over lateral occipital regions relative to neurotypical controls. The data are discussed in terms of the role of predictive feedback processes on perception of global stimulus features and the notion that weakened “priors” may play a role in the visual processing anomalies seen in autism. |
Michael Paul Schallmo; Kimberly B. Weldon; Rohit S. Kamath; Hannah R. Moser; Samantha A. Montoya; Kyle W. Killebrew; Caroline Demro; Andrea N. Grant; Małgorzata Marjańska; Scott R. Sponheim; Cheryl A. Olman The psychosis human connectome project: Design and rationale for studies of visual neurophysiology Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 272, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Schallmo2023, Visual perception is abnormal in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. In addition to hallucinations, laboratory tests show differences in fundamental visual processes including contrast sensitivity, center-surround interactions, and perceptual organization. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain visual dysfunction in psychotic disorders, including an imbalance between excitation and inhibition. However, the precise neural basis of abnormal visual perception in people with psychotic psychopathology (PwPP) remains unknown. Here, we describe the behavioral and 7 tesla MRI methods we used to interrogate visual neurophysiology in PwPP as part of the Psychosis Human Connectome Project (HCP). In addition to PwPP (n = 66) and healthy controls (n = 43), we also recruited first-degree biological relatives (n = 44) in order to examine the role of genetic liability for psychosis in visual perception. Our visual tasks were designed to assess fundamental visual processes in PwPP, whereas MR spectroscopy enabled us to examine neurochemistry, including excitatory and inhibitory markers. We show that it is feasible to collect high-quality data across multiple psychophysical, functional MRI, and MR spectroscopy experiments with a sizable number of participants at a single research site. These data, in addition to those from our previously described 3 tesla experiments, will be made publicly available in order to facilitate further investigations by other research groups. By combining visual neuroscience techniques and HCP brain imaging methods, our experiments offer new opportunities to investigate the neural basis of abnormal visual perception in PwPP. |
Eser Sendesen; Samet Kılıç; Nurhan Erbil; Özgür Aydın; Didem Turkyilmaz An exploratory study of the effect of tinnitus on listening effort using EEG and pupillometry Journal Article In: Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, vol. 169, no. 5, pp. 1259–1267, 2023. @article{Sendesen2023, Objective: Previous behavioral studies on listening effort in tinnitus patients did not consider extended high-frequency hearing thresholds and had conflicting results. This inconsistency may be related that listening effort is not evaluated by the central nervous system (CNS) and autonomic nervous system (ANS), which are directly related to tinnitus pathophysiology. This study matches hearing thresholds at all frequencies, including the extended high-frequency and reduces hearing loss to objectively evaluate listening effort over the CNS and ANS simultaneously in tinnitus patients. Study Design: Case-control study. Setting: University hospital. Methods: Sixteen chronic tinnitus patients and 23 matched healthy controls having normal pure-tone averages with symmetrical hearing thresholds were included. Subjects were evaluated with 0.125 to 20 kHz pure-tone audiometry, Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (MoCA), Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), Visual Analog Scale (VAS), electroencephalography (EEG), and pupillometry. Results: Pupil dilation and EEG alpha band in the “coding” phase of the sentence presented in tinnitus patients was less than in the control group (p <.05). VAS score was higher in the tinnitus group (p <.01). Also, there was no statistically significant relationship between EEG and pupillometry components and THI or MoCA (p >.05). Conclusion: This study suggests that tinnitus patients may need to make an extra effort to listen. Also, pupillometry may not be sufficiently reliable to assess listening effort in ANS-related pathologies. Considering the possible listening difficulties in tinnitus patients, reducing the listening difficulties, especially in noisy environments, can be added to the goals of tinnitus therapy protocols. |
Soroosh Shalileh; Dmitry Ignatov; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Olga Dragoy Identifying dyslexia in school pupils from eye movement and demographic data using artificial intelligence Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–26, 2023. @article{Shalileh2023, This paper represents our research results in the pursuit of the following objectives: (i) to introduce a novel multi-sources data set to tackle the shortcomings of the previous data sets, (ii) to propose a robust artificial intelligence-based solution to identify dyslexia in primary school pupils, (iii) to investigate our psycholinguistic knowledge by studying the importance of the features in identifying dyslexia by our best AI model. In order to achieve the first objective, we collected and annotated a new set of eye-movement-during-reading data. Furthermore, we collected demographic data, including the measure of non-verbal intelligence, to form our three data sources. Our data set is the largest eye-movement data set globally. Unlike the previously introduced binary-class data sets, it contains (A) three class labels and (B) reading speed. Concerning the second objective, we formulated the task of dyslexia prediction as regression and classification problems and scrutinized the performance of 12 classifications and eight regressions approaches. We exploited the Bayesian optimization method to fine-tune the hyperparameters of the models: and reported the average and the standard deviation of our evaluation metrics in a stratified ten-fold cross-validation. Our studies showed that multi-layer perceptron, random forest, gradient boosting, and k-nearest neighbor form the group having the most acceptable results. Moreover, we showed that although separately using each data source did not lead to accurate results, their combination led to a reliable solution. We also determined the importance of the features of our best classifier: our findings showed that the IQ, gender, and age are the top three important features; we also showed that fixation along the y-axis is more important than other fixation data. Dyslexia detection, eye fixation, eye movement, demographic, classification, regression, artificial intelligence. |
Mishaal Sharif; Yougan Saman; Rose Burling; Oliver Rea; Rakesh Patel; Douglas J. K. Barrett; Peter Rea; Amir Kheradmand; Qadeer Arshad Altered visual conscious awareness in patients with vestibular dysfunctions; a cross-sectional observation study Journal Article In: Journal of the Neurological Sciences, vol. 448, pp. 1–6, 2023. @article{Sharif2023, Background: Patients with vestibular dysfunctions often experience visual-induced symptoms. Here we asked whether such visual dependence can be related to alterations in visual conscious awareness in these patients. Methods: To measure visual conscious awareness, we used the effect of motion-induced blindness (MIB,) in which the perceptual awareness of the visual stimulus alternates despite its unchanged physical characteristics. In this phenomenon, a salient visual target spontaneously disappears and subsequently reappears from visual perception when presented against a moving visual background. The number of perceptual switches during the experience of the MIB stimulus was measured for 120 s in 15 healthy controls, 15 patients with vestibular migraine, 15 patients with benign positional paroxysmal vertigo (BPPV) and 15 with migraine without vestibular symptoms. Results: Patients with vestibular dysfunctions (i.e., both vestibular migraine and BPPV) exhibited increased perceptual fluctuations during MIB compared to healthy controls and migraine patients without vertigo. In VM patients, those with more severe symptoms exhibited higher fluctuations of visual awareness (i.e., positive correlation), whereas, in BPPV patients, those with more severe symptoms had lower fluctuations of visual awareness (i.e., negative correlation). Implications: Taken together, these findings show that fluctuations of visual awareness are linked to the severity of visual-induced symptoms in patients with vestibular dysfunctions, and distinct pathophysiological mechanisms may mediate visual vertigo in peripheral versus central vestibular dysfunctions. |
Frederick Shic; Erin C. Barney; Adam J. Naples; Kelsey J. Dommer; Shou An Chang; Beibin Li; Takumi McAllister; Adham Atyabi; Quan Wang; Raphael Bernier; Geraldine Dawson; James Dziura; Susan Faja; Shafali Spurling Jeste; Michael Murias; Scott P. Johnson; Maura Sabatos-DeVito; Gerhard Helleman; Damla Senturk; Catherine A. Sugar; Sara Jane Webb; James C. McPartland; Katarzyna Chawarska In: Autism Research, vol. 16, pp. 2150–2159, 2023. @article{Shic2023, The Selective Social Attention (SSA) task is a brief eye-tracking task involving experimental conditions varying along socio-communicative axes. Traditionally the SSA has been used to probe socially-specific attentional patterns in infants and toddlers who develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This current work extends these findings to preschool and school-age children. Children 4- to 12-years-old with ASD (N = 23) and a typically-developing comparison group (TD; N = 25) completed the SSA task as well as standardized clinical assessments. Linear mixed models examined group and condition effects on two outcome variables: percent of time spent looking at the scene relative to scene presentation time (%Valid), and percent of time looking at the face relative to time spent looking at the scene (%Face). Age and IQ were included as covariates. Outcome variables' relationships to clinical data were assessed via correlation analysis. The ASD group, compared to the TD group, looked less at the scene and focused less on the actress' face during the most socially-engaging experimental conditions. Additionally, within the ASD group, %Face negatively correlated with SRS total T-scores with a particularly strong negative correlation with the Autistic Mannerism subscale T-score. These results highlight the extensibility of the SSA to older children with ASD, including replication of between-group differences previously seen in infants and toddlers, as well as its ability to capture meaningful clinical variation within the autism spectrum across a wide developmental span inclusive of preschool and school-aged children. The properties suggest that the SSA may have broad potential as a biomarker for ASD. |
Anna Cornelia Stausberg Who are you to judge? Investigating narcissism through pupil dilation at witness testimonials Journal Article In: Psychology, vol. 14, no. 02, pp. 144–157, 2023. @article{Stausberg2023, Various literature has explored narcissistic behaviour and its distinct emotional and aggressive nature. However, there is a significant gap in research when exploring the physiological differences of individual classified as having high narcissistic traits and tendencies. Pupillometry is a measure often utilised to measure distinct differences in emotional arousal. This measure allows for excellent insight into physiological responses to various stimuli presented. This exploratory study was set up to investigate pupillometry responses to auditory stimulation in narcissistic versus control participants. Findings were consistent with previous research; however, various limitations hindered significant findings. This pilot study is a guideline for future research as it is a first attempt at exploring a physiological relationship between emotionality and narcissism in the context of a criminal hearing. |
Pnina Stern; Tamar Kolodny; Shlomit Tsafrir; Galit Cohen; Lilach Shalev In: Journal of Attention Disorders, vol. 27, no. 7, pp. 757–776, 2023. @article{Stern2023, Objective: The present study evaluated the near (attention) and far (reading, ADHD symptoms, learning, and quality of life) transfer effects of a Computerized Progressive Attention Training (CPAT) versus Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) practice among adults with ADHD compared to a passive group. Method: Fifty-four adults participated in a non-fully randomized controlled trial. Participants in the intervention groups completed eight 2-hr weekly training sessions. Outcomes were assessed before, immediately after, and 4 months post-intervention, using objective tools: attention tests, eye-tracker, and subjective questionnaires. Results: Both interventions showed near-transfer to various attention functions. The CPAT produced far-transfer effects to reading, ADHD symptoms, and learning while the MBSR improved the self-perceived quality of life. At follow-up, all improvements except for ADHD symptoms were preserved in the CPAT group. The MBSR group showed mixed preservations. Conclusion: Both interventions have beneficial effects, however only the CPAT group exhibited improvements compared to the passive group. |
Shirui Wen; Huangyemin Zhang; Kailing Huang; Xiaojie Wei; Ke Yang; Quan Wang; Li Feng Impaired orienting function detected through eye movements in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Wen2023, Objective: Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) often exhibit attention function impairment. The orienting network is the subsystem of the attention network that has not been fully studied. In this study, we used eye-tracking technology with an attention network test (ANT)-based task to assess the orienting function of TLE patients, aiming to characterize their eye movement patterns. Methods: A total of 37 TLE patients and 29 healthy controls (HCs) completed the ANT task based on eye-tracking technology. Orienting function damage was mainly assessed by the ANT orienting effect. Eye movement metrics, such as mean first goal-directed saccade latency (MGSL), total saccades, and saccade amplitudes, were compared between groups Results: The TLE patients had a significantly lower ANT orienting effect (HC, 54.05 ± 34.05; TLE, 32.29 ± 39.54) and lower eye-tracking orienting effect (HC, 116.98 ± 56.59; TLE, 86.72 ± 59.10) than those of the HCs. The larger orienting effects indicate that orienting responses are faster when receiving a spatial cue compared with a center cue. In the spatial cue condition, compared with HCs, the TLE group showed a longer first goal-directed saccade latency (HC, 76.77 ± 58.87ms; TLE, 115.14 ± 59.15ms), more total saccades (HC, 28.46 ± 12.30; TLE, 36.69 ± 15.13), and larger saccade amplitudes (HC, 0.75◦ ± 0.60◦; TLE, 1.36◦ ± 0.89◦). Furthermore, there was a positive correlation of the orienting-effect score between the ANT task and eye-tracking metrics (r = 0.58, p < 0.05). Conclusion: We innovatively developed a new detection method using eye-tracking technology in combination with an ANT-based task to detect the orienting function in TLE patients. The current research demonstrated that TLE patients had a significant orienting dysfunction with a specific saccade pattern characterized by a longer first goal-directed saccade latency, more total saccades, and larger saccade amplitudes. These oculomotor metrics are likely to be a better indicator of orienting function and may potentially be used for behavioral-based interventions and long-term cognition monitoring in TLE patients. |
Mirjam C. M. Wever; Lisanne A. E. M. Houtum; Loes H. C. Janssen; Wilma G. M. Wentholt; Iris M. Spruit; Marieke S. Tollenaar; Geert Jan Will; Bernet M. Elzinga In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1598–1609, 2023. @article{Wever2023, One of the most prevalent nonverbal, social phenomena known to automatically elicit self- and other-referential processes is eye contact. By its negative effects on the perception of social safety and views about the self and others, childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM) may fundamentally affect these processes. To investigate whether the socioaffective consequences of CEM may become visible in response to (prolonged) eye gaze, 79 adult participants (mean [M]age = 49.87, standard deviation [SD]age = 4.62) viewed videos with direct and averted gaze of an unfamiliar other and themselves while we recorded self-reported mood, eye movements using eye-tracking, and markers of neural activity using fMRI. Participants who reported higher levels of CEM exhibited increased activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex to one's own, but not to others', direct gaze. Furthermore, in contrast to those who reported fewer of such experiences, they did not report a better mood in response to a direct gaze of self and others, despite equivalent amounts of time spent looking into their own and other peoples' eyes. The fact that CEM is associated with enhanced neural activation in a brain area that is crucially involved in self-referential processing (i.e., vmPFC) in response to one's own direct gaze is in line with the chronic negative impact of CEM on a person's self-views. Interventions that directly focus on targeting maladaptive self-views elicited during eye gaze to self may be clinically useful. |
Veronica Whitford; Narissa Byers; Gillian A. O'Driscoll; Debra Titone Eye movements and the perceptual span in disordered reading: A comparison of schizophrenia and dyslexia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research: Cognition, vol. 34, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Whitford2023, Increasing evidence of a common neurodevelopmental etiology between schizophrenia and developmental dyslexia suggests that neurocognitive functions, such as reading, may be similarly disrupted. However, direct comparisons of reading performance in these disorders have yet to be conducted. To address this gap in the literature, we employed a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to examine sentence-level reading fluency and perceptual span (breadth of parafoveal processing) in adults with schizophrenia (dataset from Whitford et al., 2013) and psychiatrically healthy adults with dyslexia (newly collected dataset). We found that the schizophrenia and dyslexia groups exhibited similar reductions in sentence-level reading fluency (e.g., slower reading rates, more regressions) compared to matched controls. Similar reductions were also found for standardized language/reading and executive functioning measures. However, despite these reductions, the dyslexia group exhibited a larger perceptual span (greater parafoveal processing) than the schizophrenia group, potentially reflecting a disruption in normal foveal-parafoveal processing dynamics. Taken together, our findings suggest that reading and reading-related functions are largely similarly disrupted in schizophrenia and dyslexia, providing additional support for a common neurodevelopmental etiology. |
Sobanawartiny Wijeakumar; Samuel H. Forbes; Vincent A. Magnotta; Sean Deoni; Kiara Jackson; Vinay P. Singh; Madhuri Tiwari; Aarti Kumar; John P. Spencer Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks Journal Article In: Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 7, no. 12, pp. 2199–2211, 2023. @article{Wijeakumar2023, Stunting is associated with poor long-term cognitive, academic and economic outcomes, yet the mechanisms through which stunting impacts cognition in early development remain unknown. In a first-ever neuroimaging study conducted on infants from rural India, we demonstrate that stunting impacts a critical, early-developing cognitive system—visual working memory. Stunted infants showed poor visual working memory performance and were easily distractible. Poor performance was associated with reduced engagement of the left anterior intraparietal sulcus, a region involved in visual working memory maintenance and greater suppression in the right temporoparietal junction, a region involved in attentional shifting. When assessed one year later, stunted infants had lower problem-solving scores, while infants of normal height with greater left anterior intraparietal sulcus activation showed higher problem-solving scores. Finally, short-for-age infants with poor physical growth indices but good visual working memory performance showed more positive outcomes suggesting that intervention efforts should focus on improving working memory and reducing distractibility in infancy. |
Hanna E. Willis; I. Betina Ip; Archie Watt; Jon Campbell; Saad Jbabdi; William T. Clarke; Matthew R. Cavanaugh; Krystel R. Huxlin; Kate E. Watkins; Marco Tamietto; Holly Bridge GABA and glutamate in hMT+ link to individual differences in residual visual function after occipital stroke Journal Article In: Stroke, vol. 54, no. 9, pp. 2286–2295, 2023. @article{Willis2023, BACKGROUND: Damage to the primary visual cortex following an occipital stroke causes loss of conscious vision in the contralateral hemifield. Yet, some patients retain the ability to detect moving visual stimuli within their blind field. The present study asked whether such individual differences in blind field perception following loss of primary visual cortex could be explained by the concentration of neurotransmitters γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate or activity of the visual motion processing, human middle temporal complex (hMT+). METHODS: We used magnetic resonance imaging in 19 patients with chronic occipital stroke to measure the concentration of neurotransmitters GABA and glutamate (proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy) and functional activity in hMT+ (functional magnetic resonance imaging). We also tested each participant on a 2-interval forced choice detection task using high-contrast, moving Gabor patches. We then measured and assessed the strength of relationships between participants' residual vision in their blind field and in vivo neurotransmitter concentrations, as well as visually evoked functional magnetic resonance imaging activity in their hMT+. Levels of GABA and glutamate were also measured in a sensorimotor region, which served as a control. RESULTS: Magnetic resonance spectroscopy-derived GABA and glutamate concentrations in hMT+ (but not sensorimotor cortex) strongly predicted blind-field visual detection abilities. Performance was inversely related to levels of both inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters in hMT+ but, surprisingly, did not correlate with visually evoked blood oxygenation level-dependent signal change in this motion-sensitive region. CONCLUSIONS: Levels of GABA and glutamate in hMT+ appear to provide superior information about motion detection capabilities inside perimetrically defined blind fields compared to blood oxygenation level-dependent signal changes - in essence, serving as biomarkers for the quality of residual visual processing in the blind-field. Whether they also reflect a potential for successful rehabilitation of visual function remains to be determined. |
Pei Xie; Han-Bin Sang; Chao-Zheng Huang; Ai-Bao Zhou Effect of body-related information on food attentional bias in women with body weight dissatisfaction Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Xie2023, Women with body weight dissatisfaction (BWD) have long-term negative assessments of their body weight, which are often associated with poor eating behavior. In this study, we investigated the effect of body-related information on the food cue processing and attention of women with BWD. Sixty-eight women were recruited and assigned to either a BWD (NPSS-F > 2) (n = 32) or a no body weight dissatisfaction (NBWD) group (NPSS-F < 1) (n = 36). We measured attentional bias to food cues (high- and low-calorie) with a food probe task after exposure to body-related information and recorded eye tracking data. Body-related images were presented prior to a pair of stimulus images (food–neutral or neutral–neutral). Body-related information and food type were repeated measure factors in our study. Our results showed that the first fixation duration bias for high-calorie foods was significantly longer than for low-calorie foods after exposure to overweight cues in the BWD group. Compared with the NBWD group, the BWD group showed longer first fixation duration bias for high-calorie foods after exposure to overweight cues. The direction for high-calorie foods was significantly more often than that for low-calorie foods in the BWD group after exposure to body-related information. Our findings suggest that compared to women with NBWD, women with BWD may be more susceptible to body-related information, resulting in increased attention to high-calorie foods. |
Mengran Xu; Katelyn Rowe; Christine Purdon To approach or to avoid: The role of ambivalent motivation towards high calorie food images in restrained eaters Journal Article In: Cognitive Therapy and Research, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 669–680, 2023. @article{Xu2023b, Background: Individuals who engage in restrained eating are often torn between eating enjoyment and weight control. Recent research found visual attention to threat varied according to motivation, and people with ambivalent motivation about threat showed greater anxiety. Methods: A total number of 225 individuals high in restrained eating completed a passive viewing task in which they were presented with image pairs of high calorie food and neutral objects while their eye movements were tracked. Participants also rated their motivation to look towards and away from food images and completed measures of mood and thought-shape fusion. Results: Two-thirds of participants reported strong motivation to look at food images, and the rest were highly motivated to avoid, were indifferent, or were ambivalent. Visual attention to food images varied according to motivation. Ambivalent individuals had higher thought-shape fusion scores and were more restrained in their eating than engagers and indifferent individuals. Conclusions: These findings suggest that motivation to attend to and avoid food images are important factors to study, as they are associated with attentional biases and eating pathology. Clinical implications are also discussed. |
Chaoqing Yang; Linlin He; Yucheng Liu; Ziyang Lin; Lizhu Luo; Shan Gao Anti-saccades reveal impaired attention control over negative social evaluation in individuals with depressive symptoms Journal Article In: Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol. 165, pp. 64–69, 2023. @article{Yang2023, Depressed individuals are excessively sensitive to negative information but blunt to positive information, which has been considered as vulnerability to depression. Here, we focused on inhibitory control over attentional bias on social evaluation in individuals with depression. We engaged individuals with and without depressive symptoms (categorized by Beck Depression Inventory-II) in a novel attention control task using positive and negative evaluative adjectives as self-referential feedback given by social others. Participants were instructed to look at sudden onset feedback targets (pro-saccade) or the mirror location of the targets (anti-saccade) when correct saccade latencies and saccade errors were collected. The two indices showed that while both groups displayed longer latencies and more errors for anti-saccade relative to pro-saccade responses depressed individuals spent more time reacting correctly and made more errors than non-depressed individuals in the anti-saccade trials and such group differences were not observed in the pro-saccade trials. Although group differences in correct anti-saccade latencies were found for both positive and negative stimuli, depressed individuals spent more time making correct anti-saccade responses to negative social feedback than to positive ones whereas non-depressed individuals featured longer correct anti-saccade latencies for positive relative to negative evaluations. Our results suggest that depressed individuals feature an impaired ability in attention control for self-referential evaluations, notably those of negative valence, shedding new light on depression-distorted self-schema and corresponding social dysfunctions. |
Qiong Zhang; Weifeng Sun; Kailing Huang; Li Qin; Shirui Wen; Xiaoyan Long; Quan Wang; Li Feng Frontal lobe epilepsy: An eye tracking study of memory and attention Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Zhang2023c, Objective: To explore the characteristics and mechanisms of working memory impairment in patients with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) through a memory game paradigm combined with eye tracking technology. Method: We included 44 patients with FLE and 50 healthy controls (HC). All participants completed a series of neuropsychological scale assessments and a short-term memory game on an automated computer-based memory evaluation platform with an eye tracker. Results: Memory scale scores of FLE patients including digit span (U = 747.50 |
Junyi Zhou; Zhanshuang Bai In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–8, 2023. @article{Zhou2023, Introduction: Previous studies have shown that brief moderate-intensity aerobic exercise can improve the executive function of healthy adults. The present study sought to examine and compare the effects of brief moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on the executive functions of undergraduates with and without mobile phone addiction. Method: Thirty-two healthy undergraduates with mobile phone addiction were recruited and randomly assigned to either an exercise or control group. Likewise, 32 healthy undergraduates without mobile phone addiction were recruited and randomly assigned to either an exercise or control group. Participants were asked to perform moderate-intensity aerobic exercise for 15 minutes for the exercise groups. The executive functions of all participants were assessed via the antisaccade task twice (i.e., pre-test and post-test). Results: The results showed that the saccade latency, variability of saccade latency, and error rate decreased significantly from pre-test to post-test for all participants. More importantly, after the 15-min moderate-intensity aerobic exercise intervention, participants in the exercise groups showed significantly shorter saccade latency than their counterparts in the control groups, regardless of whether they are with mobile phone addiction. Discussion: This result is consistent with previous studies demonstrating that brief moderate-intensity aerobic exercise can improve one's executive function. Furthermore, the absence of significant interaction among Time, Group, and Intervention implies that the effects of brief moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on executive function are comparable between participants with and without mobile phone addiction. The present study supports the previous conclusion that brief moderate-intensity aerobic exercise can improve one's executive function effectively, and extends it to the population with mobile phone addiction. In summary, the present study has some implications for understanding of the relationship between exercise, executive function, and mobile phone addiction. |
Wei Zhou; Yi Fan; Yulin Chang; Wenjuan Liu; Jiuju Wang; Yufeng Wang Pathogenesis of comorbid adhd and chinese developmental dyslexia: Evidence from eye-movement tracking and rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Attention Disorders, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 294–306, 2023. @article{Zhou2023f, Background: ADHD and Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) have a very high comorbidity rate; however, which cognitive deficits characterize the comorbidity and when they occur during cognitive processing are still under debate. Methods: Rapid automatic naming (RAN) tasks with eye-movement tracking were conducted with 75 children who were typically developing, had comorbid ADHD and DD, had only ADHD, and had only DD. Results: The clinical groups had longer first fixation durations than the control for RAN digits. Temporal eye-movement measures, such as gaze duration and total reading time, were found to vary between the comorbidity and ADHD groups. Spatial eye-movement measures, such as regression probability and incoming saccade amplitude, differed between the comorbidity and DD groups. Conclusions: These results indicate that investigation with eye-movement measures combined with RAN tasks can strengthen the understanding of the pathogenesis of comorbid ADHD and DD. |
Xi Zhu; Amit Lazarov; Sarah Dolan; Yair Bar-Haim; Daniel G. Dillon; Diego A. Pizzagalli; Franklin Schneier Resting state connectivity predictors of symptom change during gaze-contingent music reward therapy of social anxiety disorder Journal Article In: Psychological Medicine, vol. 53, no. 7, pp. 3115–3123, 2023. @article{Zhu2023a, Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is common, first-line treatments are often only partially effective, and reliable predictors of treatment response are lacking. Here, we assessed resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) at pre-treatment and during early treatment as a potential predictor of response to a novel attention bias modification procedure, gaze-contingent music reward therapy (GC-MRT). Methods Thirty-two adults with SAD were treated with GC-MRT. rsFC was assessed with multi-voxel pattern analysis of fMRI at pre-treatment and after 2-3 weeks. For comparison, 20 healthy control (HC) participants without treatment were assessed twice for rsFC over the same time period. All SAD participants underwent clinical evaluation at pre-treatment, early-treatment (week 2-3), and post-treatment. Results SAD and depressive symptoms improved significantly from pre-treatment to post-treatment. After 2-3 weeks of treatment, decreased connectivity between the executive control network (ECN) and salience network (SN), and increased connectivity within the ECN predicted improvement in SAD and depressive symptoms at week 8. Increased connectivity between the ECN and default mode network (DMN) predicted greater improvement in SAD but not depressive symptoms at week 8. Connectivity within the DMN decreased significantly after 2-3 weeks of treatment in the SAD group, while no changes were found in HC over the same time interval. Conclusion We identified early changes in rsFC during a course of GC-MRT for SAD that predicted symptom change. Connectivity changes within the ECN, ECN-DMN, and ECN-SN may be related to mechanisms underlying the clinical effects of GC-MRT and warrant further study in controlled trials. |
Anastasia A. Ziubanova; Anna K. Laurinavichyute; Olga Parshina Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers? Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Ziubanova2023, Introduction: Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. Methods: In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Results: Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found. Discussion: Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children. |
Carolin Zsigo; Lisa Feldmann; Frans Oort; Charlotte Piechaczek; Jürgen Bartling; Martin Schulte-Rüther; Christian Wachinger; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Ellen Greimel Emotion regulation training for adolescents with major depression: Results from a randomized controlled trial Journal Article In: Emotion, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Zsigo2023, Difficulties in emotion regulation (ER) are thought to contribute to the development and maintenance of major depression (MD) in adolescents. In healthy adults, a task-based training of ER has previously proven effective to reduce stress, but no such studies are available for MD. It is also unclear whether findings can be generalized onto adolescent populations. The final sample consisted of n = 70 adolescents with MD, who were randomized to a task-based ER training (n = 36) or a control training (n = 34). Across four sessions, the ER group was trained to downregulate negative affect to negative images via reappraisal, while the control group was instructed to attend the images. Rumination, stress-, and affect-related measures were assessed as primary outcomes, behavioral and neurophysiological responses (late positive potential, LPP), as secondary outcomes. The trial was preregistered at clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03957850). While there was no significant differential effect of the ER training on primary outcomes, we found small to moderate effects on rumination in the ER group, but not the control group. During reappraisal (compared to attend), the ER group showed an unexpected increase of the LPP during the first, but not during later training sessions. Although replication in large, multicenter trials is needed, our findings on effect sizes suggest that ER training might be promising to decrease rumination in adolescent MD. The LPP increase at the first session may represent cognitive effort, which was successfully reduced over the sessions. Future studies should research whether training effects transfer to daily life and are durable over a longer time period. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) |
Isabel Kreis; Lei Zhang; Matthias Mittner; Leonard Syla; Claus Lamm; Gerit Pfuhl In: Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 727–741, 2023. @article{Kreis2023, Aberrant belief updating due to misestimation of uncertainty and an increased perception of the world as volatile (i.e., unstable) has been found in autism and psychotic disorders. Pupil dilation tracks events that warrant belief updating, likely reflecting the adjustment of neural gain. However, whether subclinical autistic or psychotic symptoms affect this adjustment and how they relate to learning in volatile environments remains to be unraveled. We investigated the relationship between behavioral and pupillometric markers of subjective volatility (i.e., experience of the world as unstable), autistic traits, and psychotic-like experiences in 52 neurotypical adults with a probabilistic reversal learning task. Computational modeling revealed that participants with higher psychotic-like experience scores overestimated volatility in low-volatile task periods. This was not the case for participants scoring high on autistic-like traits, who instead showed a diminished adaptation of choice-switching behavior in response to risk. Pupillometric data indicated that individuals with higher autistic- or psychotic-like trait and experience scores differentiated less between events that warrant belief updating and those that do not when volatility was high. These findings are in line with misestimation of uncertainty accounts of psychosis and autism spectrum disorders and indicate that aberrancies are already present at the subclinical level. |
Wupadrasta Santosh Kumar; Supratim Ray Healthy ageing and cognitive impairment alter EEG functional connectivity in distinct frequency bands Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 3432–3449, 2023. @article{Kumar2023, Functional connectivity (FC) indicates the interdependencies between brain signals recorded from spatially distinct locations in different frequency bands, which is modulated by cognitive tasks and is known to change with ageing and cognitive disorders. Recently, the power of narrow-band gamma oscillations induced by visual gratings have been shown to reduce with both healthy ageing and in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, the impact of ageing/MCI on stimulus-induced gamma FC has not been well studied. We recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) from a large cohort (N = 229) of elderly subjects (>49 years) while they viewed large cartesian gratings to induce gamma oscillations and studied changes in alpha and gamma FC with healthy ageing (N = 218) and MCI (N = 11). Surprisingly, we found distinct differences across age and MCI groups in power and FC. With healthy ageing, alpha power did not change but FC decreased significantly. MCI reduced gamma but not alpha FC significantly compared with age and gender matched controls, even when power was matched between the two groups. Overall, our results suggest distinct effects of ageing and disease on EEG power and FC, suggesting different mechanisms underlying ageing and cognitive disorders. |
Rony Lemel; Lilach Shalev; Gal Nitsan; Boaz M. Ben-David Listen up! ADHD slows spoken-word processing in adverse listening conditions: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Research in Developmental Disabilities, vol. 133, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Lemel2023, Background: Cognitive skills such as sustained attention, inhibition and working memory are essential for speech processing, yet are often impaired in people with ADHD. Offline measures have indicated difficulties in speech recognition on multi-talker babble (MTB) background for young adults with ADHD (yaADHD). However, to-date no study has directly tested online speech processing in adverse conditions for yaADHD. Aims: Gauging the effects of ADHD on segregating the spoken target-word from its sound-sharing competitor, in MTB and working-memory (WM) load. Methods and procedures: Twenty-four yaADHD and 22 matched controls that differ in sustained attention (SA) but not in WM were asked to follow spoken instructions presented on MTB to touch a named object, while retaining one (low-load) or four (high-load) digit/s for later recall. Their eye fixations were tracked. Outcomes and results: In the high-load condition, speech processing was less accurate and slowed by 140ms for yaADHD. In the low-load condition, the processing advantage shifted from early perceptual to later cognitive stages. Fixation transitions (hesitations) were inflated for yaADHD. Conclusions and implications: ADHD slows speech processing in adverse listening conditions and increases hesitation, as speech unfolds in time. These effects, detected only by online eyetracking, relate to attentional difficulties. We suggest online speech processing as a novel purview on ADHD. What this paper adds?: We suggest speech processing in adverse listening conditions as a novel vantage point on ADHD. Successful speech recognition in noise is essential for performance across daily settings: academic, employment and social interactions. It involves several executive functions, such as inhibition and sustained attention. Impaired performance in these functions is characteristic of ADHD. However, to date there is only scant research on speech processing in ADHD. The current study is the first to investigate online speech processing as the word unfolds in time using eyetracking for young adults with ADHD (yaADHD). This method uncovered slower speech processing in multi-talker babble noise for yaADHD compared to matched controls. The performance of yaADHD indicated increased hesitation between the spoken word and sound-sharing alternatives (e.g., CANdle-CANdy). These delays and hesitations, on the single word level, could accumulate in continuous speech to significantly impair communication in ADHD, with severe implications on their quality of life and academic success. Interestingly, whereas yaADHD and controls were matched on WM standardized tests, WM load appears to affect speech processing for yaADHD more than for controls. This suggests that ADHD may lead to inefficient deployment of WM resources that may not be detected when WM is tested alone. Note that these intricate differences could not be detected using traditional offline accuracy measures, further supporting the use of eyetracking in speech tasks. Finally, communication is vital for active living and wellbeing. We suggest paying attention to speech processing in ADHD in treatment and when considering accessibility and inclusion. |
Haolun Li; Zhijun Li; Guanyi Lyu; Mi Wang; Bangshan Liu; Yan Zhang; Lingjiang Li; Greg J. Siegle Suicide-relevant information processing in unipolar and bipolar depression: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, vol. 132, no. 4, pp. 361–371, 2023. @article{Li2023c, Suicide-relevant attentional biases are found in suicide attempters (SAs) with depression. Wenzel and Beck provide a theoretical framework that suggests suicide-related attention biases confer vulnerability to suicide. In this study, we integrated eye-tracking dynamics of suicide-related attentional biases with self-report mea- sures to test their model. A free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm, which simultaneously presented four images with different valences (suicide-related, negative, positive, neutral), was examined in 76 SAs with unipolar or bipolar depression, 66 nonsuicidal depressive participants (ND), and 105 healthy never- depressed healthy control participants (HC). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for the theory testing. SA gazed more at suicide-relevant stimuli throughout the 25-s trial compared with ND. SA and ND initially detected suicide-related stimuli faster than HC. Groups did not differ on how often they initially gazed at suicide images or how fast they disengaged away from them. Eye-tracking indices of attentional biases, together with self-reported hopelessness, adequately fit an SEM consistent with Wenzel and Beck's cognitive theory of suicide-related information processing. Potentially, suicide-related attention biases could increase vulnerability to suicidal ideation and eventual suicidal behaviors. |
Beatriz López; Nicola Jean Gregory; Megan Freeth Social attention patterns of autistic and non-autistic adults when viewing real versus reel people Journal Article In: Autism, vol. 27, no. 8, pp. 2372–2383, 2023. @article{Lopez2023, Research consistently shows that autistic adults do not attend to faces as much as non-autistic adults. However, this conclusion is largely based on studies using pre-recorded videos or photographs as stimuli. In studies using real social scenarios, the evidence is not as clear. To explore the extent to which differences in findings relate to differences in the methodologies used across studies, we directly compared social attention of 32 autistic and 33 non-autistic adults when watching exactly the same video. However, half of the participants in each group were told simply to watch the video (Video condition), and the other half were led to believe they were watching a live webcam feed (‘Live' condition). The results yielded no significant group differences in the ‘Live' condition. However, significant group differences were found in the ‘Video' condition. In this condition, non-autistic participants, but not autistic participants, showed a marked social bias towards faces. The findings highlight the importance of studying social attention combining different methods. Specifically, we argue that studies using pre-recorded footage and studies using real people tap into separate components contributing to social attention. One that is an innate, automatic component and one that is modulated by social norms. Lay Abstract: Early research shows that autistic adults do not attend to faces as much as non-autistic adults. However, some recent studies where autistic people are placed in scenarios with real people reveal that they attend to faces as much as non-autistic people. This study compares attention to faces in two situations. In one, autistic and non-autistic adults watched a pre-recorded video. In the other, they watched what they thought were two people in a room in the same building, via a life webcam, when in fact exactly the same video in two situations. We report the results of 32 autistic adults and 33 non-autistic adults. The results showed that autistic adults do not differ in any way from non-autistic adults when they watched what they believed was people interacting in real time. However, when they thought they were watching a video, non-autistic participants showed higher levels of attention to faces than non-autistic participants. We conclude that attention to social stimuli is the result of a combination of two processes. One innate, which seems to be different in autism, and one that is influenced by social norms, which works in the same way in autistic adults without learning disabilities. The results suggest that social attention is not as different in autism as first thought. Specifically, the study contributes to dispel long-standing deficit models regarding social attention in autism as it points to subtle differences in the use of social norms rather than impairments. |
Changlin Luo; Mengyan Zhu; Xiangling Zhuang; Guojie Ma Food word processing in Chinese reading: A study of restrained eaters Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 114, no. 2, pp. 476–494, 2023. @article{Luo2023a, Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. Eye movements were recorded when they performed a naturalistic sentence-reading task. The results of later-stage analyses showed that food words were fixated on for less time than non-food words, which indicated a superiority of foveal food-word processing for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. The results of early-stage analyses showed that restrained eaters spent more time on pre-target regions in the food-word valid preview conditions, which indicated a parafoveal food-word processing superiority for restrained eaters (i.e. the parafoveal-on-foveal effect). The superiority of foveal food-word processing provides new insights into explaining food-related attentional bias in general groups. Additionally, the enhanced food-word attentional bias in parafoveal processing for restrained eaters illustrates the importance of individual characteristics in studying word recognition. |
Sylwia Macinska; Shane Lindsay; Tjeerd Jellema Visual attention to dynamic emotional faces in adults on the autism spectrum Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Macinska2023, Using eye-tracking, we studied allocation of attention to faces where the emotional expression and eye-gaze dynamically changed in an ecologically-valid manner. We tested typically-developed (TD) adults low or high in autistic-like traits (Experiment 1), and adults with high-functioning autism (HFA; Experiment 2). All groups fixated more on the eyes than on any of the other facial area, regardless of emotion and gaze direction, though the HFA group fixated less on the eyes and more on the nose than TD controls. The sequence of dynamic facial changes affected the groups similarly, with reduced attention to the eyes and increased attention to the mouth. The results suggest that dynamic emotional face scanning patterns are stereotypical and differ only modestly between TD and HFA adults. |
Marcello Maniglia; Kristina M. Visscher; Aaron R. Seitz Consistency of preferred retinal locus across tasks and participants trained with a simulated scotoma Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 203, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Maniglia2023, After loss of central vision following retinal pathologies such as macular degeneration (MD), patients often adopt compensatory strategies including developing a “preferred retinal locus” (PRL) to replace the fovea in tasks involving fixation. A key question is whether patients develop multi-purpose PRLs or whether their oculomotor strategies adapt to the demands of the task. While most MD patients develop a PRL, clinical evidence suggests that patients may develop multiple PRLs and switch between them according to the task at hand. To understand this, we examined a model of central vision loss in normally seeing individuals and tested whether they used the same or different PRLs across tasks after training. Nineteen participants trained for 10 sessions on contrast detection while in conditions of gaze-contingent, simulated central vision loss. Before and after training, peripheral looking strategies were evaluated during tasks measuring visual acuity, reading abilities and visual search. To quantify strategies in these disparate, naturalistic tasks, we measured and compared the amount of task-relevant information at each of 8 equally spaced, peripheral locations, while participants performed the tasks. Results showed that some participants used consistent viewing strategies across tasks whereas other participants' strategies differed depending on task. This novel method allows quantification of peripheral vision use even in relatively ecological tasks. These results represent one of the first examinations of peripheral viewing strategies across tasks in simulated vision loss. Results suggest that individual differences in peripheral looking strategies following simulated central vision loss may model those developed in pathological vision loss. |
Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez; Amit Lazarov; Xi Zhu; Daniel S. Pine; Yair Bar-Haim; Yuval Neria Attention allocation to negatively-valenced stimuli in PTSD is associated with reward-related neural pathways Journal Article In: Psychological Medicine, vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 4666–4674, 2023. @article{SuarezJimenez2023, Background. In a recent eye-tracking study we found a differential dwell time pattern for negatively-valenced and neutral faces among patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma-exposed healthy control (TEHCs), and healthy control (HC) participants. Here, we explored whether these group differences relate to resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) patterns of brain areas previously linked to both attention processes and PTSD. These encompass the amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), and nucleus accumbens (NAcc).Methods.Ten minutes magnetic resonance imaging rsFC scans were recorded in 17 PTSD patients, 21 TEHCs, and 16 HCs. Participants then completed a free-viewing eye-tracking task assessing attention allocation outside the scanner. Dwell time on negatively-valenced stimuli (DT%) were assessed relative to functional connectivity in the aforementioned seed regions of interest (amygdala, dACC, dlPFC, vlPFC, and NAcc) to whole-brain voxel-wise rsFC.Results. As previously reported, group differences occurred in attention allocation to negative-valence stimuli, with longer dwell time on negatively valence stimuli in the PTSD and TEHC groups than the HC group. Higher DT% correlated with weaker NAcc-orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) connectivity in patients with PTSD. Conversely, a positive association emerged in the HC group between DT% and NAcc-OFC connectivity.Conclusions. While exploratory in nature, present findings may suggest that reward-related brain areas are involved in disengaging attention from negative-valenced stimuli, and possibly in regulating ensuing negative emotions. |
Binbin Sun; Bryan Wang; Zhen Wei; Zhe Feng; Zhi Liu Wu; Walid Yassin; William S. Stone; Yan Lin; Xue Jun Kong Identification of diagnostic markers for ASD: A restrictive interest analysis based on EEG combined with eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Sun2023, Electroencephalography (EEG) functional connectivity (EFC) and eye tracking (ET) have been explored as objective screening methods for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but no study has yet evaluated restricted and repetitive behavior (RRBs) simultaneously to infer early ASD diagnosis. Typically developing (TD) children (n = 27) and ASD (n = 32), age- and sex-matched, were evaluated with EFC and ET simultaneously, using the restricted interest stimulus paradigm. Network-based machine learning prediction (NBS-predict) was used to identify ASD. Correlations between EFC, ET, and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Second Edition (ADOS-2) were performed. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) of receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) was measured to evaluate the predictive performance. Under high restrictive interest stimuli (HRIS), ASD children have significantly higher α band connectivity and significantly more total fixation time (TFT)/pupil enlargement of ET relative to TD children (p = 0.04299). These biomarkers were not only significantly positively correlated with each other (R = 0.716 |
Sai Sun; Runnan Cao; Ueli Rutishauser; Rongjun Yu; Shuo Wang A uniform human multimodal dataset for emotion perception and judgment Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Sun2023c, Face perception is a fundamental aspect of human social interaction, yet most research on this topic has focused on single modalities and specific aspects of face perception. Here, we present a comprehensive multimodal dataset for examining facial emotion perception and judgment. This dataset includes EEG data from 97 unique neurotypical participants across 8 experiments, fMRI data from 19 neurotypical participants, single-neuron data from 16 neurosurgical patients (22 sessions), eye tracking data from 24 neurotypical participants, behavioral and eye tracking data from 18 participants with ASD and 15 matched controls, and behavioral data from 3 rare patients with focal bilateral amygdala lesions. Notably, participants from all modalities performed the same task. Overall, this multimodal dataset provides a comprehensive exploration of facial emotion perception, emphasizing the importance of integrating multiple modalities to gain a holistic understanding of this complex cognitive process. This dataset serves as a key missing link between human neuroimaging and neurophysiology literature, and facilitates the study of neuropsychiatric populations. |
Cheng-Hui Tan; Qi-Qi Xing; Yuan Zhao; Bo-Hai Song; Chuan-Lin Zhu; Jun-Jie Qiu; Mu-Ye He; Dian-Zhi Liu Goal-directed action anticipation and prediction error processing in children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, vol. 106, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Tan2023, Background: Differences in predictive ability have been proposed as a possible explanation for the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study aimed to investigate potential differences in prior knowledge acquisition and application for goal-directed anticipation in children with ASD. Method: The study included 22 children with ASD and 19 typically developing (TD) children between the ages of 5–10 years. Two eye-tracking phases were used to examine the formation of goal-directed action anticipations and the processing of action prediction errors. In the action anticipation formation phase, participants were asked to observe goal-directed actions repeatedly to examine prior knowledge acquisition about agent-goal association. In the action anticipation violation phase, the goals of actions were changed to examine the application of previously acquired knowledge. Results: Children with ASD required more trials to form goal-directed anticipations than TD children. Furthermore, prior knowledge acquisition was characterized by variability and instability in children with ASD. During the action anticipation violation phase, children with ASD exhibited lower preference for the action goal determined by prior knowledge in uncertain situations. This atypical processing of prior knowledge was significantly correlated with the severity of ASD symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings support the Bayesian perception theory and predictive coding theory, suggesting that children with ASD may experience difficulties in both the acquisition and application of prior knowledge in anticipation. These findings have implications for developing interventions to improve goal-directed anticipation and reduce social and communication difficulties in individuals with ASD. |
Yasuo Terao; Shin-ichi Tokushige; Satomi Inomata-Terada; Tai Miyazaki; Naoki Kotsuki; Francesco Fisicaro; Yoshikazu Ugawa How do patients with Parkinson's disease and cerebellar ataxia read aloud? -Eye–voice coordination in text reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Terao2023a, Background: The coordination between gaze and voice is closely linked when reading text aloud, with the gaze leading the reading position by a certain eye–voice lead (EVL). How this coordination is affected is unknown in patients with cerebellar ataxia and parkinsonism, who show oculomotor deficits possibly impacting coordination between different effectors. Objective: To elucidate the role of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in eye–voice coordination during reading aloud, by studying patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and spinocerebellar degeneration (SCD). Methods: Participants were sixteen SCD patients, 18 PD patients, and 30 age-matched normal subjects, all native Japanese speakers without cognitive impairment. Subjects read aloud Japanese texts of varying readability displayed on a monitor in front of their eyes, consisting of Chinese characters and hiragana (Japanese phonograms). The gaze and voice reading the text was simultaneously recorded by video-oculography and a microphone. A custom program synchronized and aligned the gaze and audio data in time. Results: Reading speed was significantly reduced in SCD patients (3.53 ± 1.81 letters/s), requiring frequent regressions to compensate for the slow reading speed. In contrast, PD patients read at a comparable speed to normal subjects (4.79 ± 3.13 letters/s vs. 4.71 ± 2.38 letters/s). The gaze scanning speed, excluding regressive saccades, was slower in PD patients (9.64 ± 4.26 letters/s) compared to both normal subjects (12.55 ± 5.42 letters/s) and SCD patients (10.81 ± 4.52 letters/s). PD patients' gaze could not far exceed that of the reading speed, with smaller allowance for the gaze to proceed ahead of the reading position. Spatial EVL was similar across the three groups for all texts (normal: 2.95 ± 1.17 letters/s, PD: 2.95 ± 1.51 letters/s, SCD: 3.21 ± 1.35 letters/s). The ratio of gaze duration to temporal EVL was lowest for SCD patients (normal: 0.73 ± 0.50, PD: 0.70 ± 0.37, SCD: 0.40 ± 0.15). Conclusion: Although coordination between voice and eye movements and normal eye-voice span was observed in both PD and SCD, SCD patients made frequent regressions to manage the slowed vocal output, restricting the ability for advance processing of text ahead of the gaze. In contrast, PD patients experience restricted reading speed primarily due to slowed scanning, limiting their maximum reading speed but effectively utilizing advance processing of upcoming text. |
Nikita Thomas; Jennifer H. Acton; Jonathan T. Erichsen; Tony Redmond; Matt J. Dunn Reliability of gaze-contingent perimetry Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Thomas2023, Standard automated perimetry, a psychophysical task performed routinely in eyecare clinics, requires observers to maintain fixation for several minutes at a time in order to measure visual field sensitivity. Detection of visual field damage is confounded by eye movements, making the technique unreliable in poorly attentive individuals and those with pathologically unstable fixation, such as nystagmus. Microperimetry, which utilizes ‘partial gaze-contingency' (PGC), aims to counteract eye movements but only corrects for gaze position errors prior to each stimulus onset. Here, we present a novel method of visual field examination in which stimulus position is updated during presentation, which we refer to as ‘continuous gaze-contingency' (CGC). In the first part of this study, we present three case examples that demonstrate the ability of CGC to measure the edges of the physiological blind spot in infantile nystagmus with greater accuracy than PGC and standard ‘no gaze-contingency' (NoGC), as initial proof-of-concept for the utility of the paradigm in measurements of absolute scotomas in these individuals. The second part of this study focused on healthy observers, in which we demonstrate that CGC has the lowest stimulus positional error (gaze-contingent precision: CGC = ± 0.29° |
Malathi Thothathiri; Jeremy Kirkwood; Abhijeet Patra; Anna Krason; Erica L. Middleton Multimodal measures of sentence comprehension in agrammatism Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 169, pp. 309–325, 2023. @article{Thothathiri2023, Agrammatic or asyntactic comprehension is a common language impairment in aphasia. We considered three possible hypotheses about the underlying cause of this deficit, namely problems in syntactic processing, over-reliance on semantics, and a deficit in cognitive control. We tested four individuals showing asyntactic comprehension on their comprehension of syntax-semantics conflict sentences (e.g., The robber handcuffed the cop), where semantic cues pushed towards a different interpretation from syntax. Two of the four participants performed above chance on such sentences indicating that not all agrammatic individuals are impaired in structure-based interpretation. We collected additional eyetracking measures from the other two participants, who performed at chance on the conflict sentences. These measures suggested distinct underlying processing profiles in the two individuals. Cognitive assessments further suggested that one participant might have performed poorly due to a linguistic cognitive control impairment while the other had difficulty due to over-reliance on semantics. Together, the results highlight the importance of multimodal measures for teasing apart aphasic individuals' underlying deficits. They corroborate findings from neurotypical adults by showing that semantics can strongly influence comprehension and that cognitive control could be relevant for choosing between competing sentence interpretations. They extend previous findings by demonstrating variability between individuals with aphasia—cognitive control might be especially relevant for patients who are not overly reliant on semantics. Clinically, the identification of distinct underlying problems in different individuals suggests that different treatment paths might be warranted for cases who might look similar on behavioral assessments. |
Shin-ichi Tokushige; Hideyuki Matsumoto; Shun-ichi Matsuda; Satomi Inomata-Terada; Naoki Kotsuki; Masashi Hamada; Shoji Tsuji; Yoshikazu Ugawa; Yasuo Terao Early detection of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease using eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, vol. 15, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Tokushige2023, Background: Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are known to exhibit visuospatial processing impairment, as reflected in eye movements from the early stages of the disease. We investigated whether the pattern of gaze exploration during visual tasks could be useful for detecting cognitive decline at the earliest stage. Methods: Sixteen AD patients (age: 79.1 ± 7.9 years, Mini Mental State Examination [MMSE] score: 17.7 ± 5.3, mean ± standard deviation) and 16 control subjects (age: 79.4 ± 4.6, MMSE score: 26.9 ± 2.4) participated. In the visual memory task, subjects memorized presented line drawings for later recall. In the visual search tasks, they searched for a target Landolt ring of specific orientation (serial search task) or color (pop-out task) embedded among arrays of distractors. Using video-oculography, saccade parameters, patterns of gaze exploration, and pupil size change during task performance were recorded and compared between AD and control subjects. Results: In the visual memory task, the number of informative regions of interest (ROIs) fixated was significantly reduced in AD patients compared to control subjects. In the visual search task, AD patients took a significantly longer time and more saccades to detect the target in the serial but not in pop-out search. In both tasks, there was no significant difference in the saccade frequency and amplitude between groups. On-task pupil modulation during the serial search task was decreased in AD. The number of ROIs fixated in the visual memory task and search time and saccade numbers in the serial search task differentiated both grwoups of subjects with high sensitivity, whereas saccade parameters of pupil size modulation were effective in confirming normal cognition from cognitive decline with high specificity. Discussion: Reduced fixation on informative ROIs reflected impaired attentional allocation. Increased search time and saccade numbers in the visual search task indicated inefficient visual processing. Decreased on-task pupil size during visual search suggested decreased pupil modulation with cognitive load in AD patients, reflecting impaired function of the locus coeruleus. When patients perform the combination of these tasks to visualize multiple aspects of visuospatial processing, cognitive decline can be detected at an early stage with high sensitivity and specificity and its progression be evaluated. |
Tawny Tsang; Adam J. Naples; Erin C. Barney; Minhang Xie; Raphael Bernier; Geraldine Dawson; James Dziura; Susan Faja; Shafali Spurling Jeste; James C. McPartland; Charles A. Nelson; Michael Murias; Helen Seow; Catherine Sugar; Sara J. Webb; Frederick Shic; Scott P. Johnson Attention allocation during exploration of visual arrays in ASD: Results from the ABC-CT feasibility study Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 53, no. 8, pp. 3220–3229, 2023. @article{Tsang2023, Visual exploration paradigms involving object arrays have been used to examine salience of social stimuli such as faces in ASD. Recent work suggests performance on these paradigms may associate with clinical features of ASD. We evaluate metrics from a visual exploration paradigm in 4-to-11-year-old children with ASD (n = 23; 18 males) and typical development (TD; n = 23; 13 males). Presented with arrays containing faces and nonsocial stimuli, children with ASD looked less at (p = 0.002) and showed fewer fixations to (p = 0.022) faces than TD children, and spent less time looking at each object on average (p = 0.004). Attention to the screen and faces correlated positively with social and cognitive skills in the ASD group (ps <.05). This work furthers our understanding of objective measures of visual exploration in ASD and its potential for quantifying features of ASD. |
Willem S. Boxtel; Briana N. Cox; Austin Keen; Jiyeon Lee Planning sentence production in aphasia: Evidence from structural priming and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Language Sciences, vol. 2, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Boxtel2023, Background: Grammatical encoding is impaired in many persons with aphasia (PWA), resulting in deficits in sentence production accuracies and underlying planning processes. However, relatively little is known on how these grammatical encoding deficits can be mediated in PWA. This study aimed to facilitate off-line (accuracy) and real-time (eye fixations) encoding of passive sentences through implicit structural priming, a tendency to better process a current sentence because of its grammatical similarity to a previously experienced (prime) sentence. Method: Sixteen PWA and Sixteen age-matched controls completed an eyetracking-while-speaking task, where they described a target transitive picture preceded by a comprehension prime involving either an active or passive form. We measured immediate and cumulative priming effects on proportions of passives produced for the target pictures and proportions of eye fixations made to the theme actor in the target scene before speech onset of the sentence production. Results and conclusion: Both PWA and controls produced cumulatively more passives as the experiment progressed despite an absence of immediate priming effects in PWA. Both groups also showed cumulative changes in the pre-speech eye fixations associated with passive productions, with this cumulative priming effect greater for the PWA group. These findings suggest that structural priming results in gradual adaptation of the grammatical encoding processes of PWA and that structural priming may be used as a treatment component for improving grammatical deficits in aphasia. |
Susanne M. Veen; Robert A. Perera; Laura Manning-Franke; Amma A. Agyemang; Karen Skop; Scott R. Sponheim; Elisabeth A. Wilde; Alexander Stamenkovic; James S. Thomas; William C. Walker Executive function and relation to static balance metrics in chronic mild TBI: A LIMBIC-CENC secondary analysis Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neurology, vol. 13, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Veen2023, Introduction: Among patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), postural instability often persists chronically with negative consequences such as higher fall risk. One explanation may be reduced executive function (EF) required to effectively process, interpret and combine, sensory information. In other populations, a decline in higher cognitive functions are associated with a decline in walking and balance skills. Considering the link between EF decline and reduction in functional capacity, we investigated whether specific tests of executive function could predict balance function in a cohort of individuals with a history of chronic mild TBI (mTBI) and compared to individuals with a negative history of mTBI. Methods: Secondary analysis was performed on the local LIMBIC-CENC cohort (N = 338, 259 mTBI, mean 45 ± STD 10 age). Static balance was assessed with the sensory organization test (SOT). Hierarchical regression was used for each EF test outcome using the following blocks: (1) the number of TBIs sustained, age, and sex; (2) the separate Trail making test (TMT); (3) anti-saccade eye tracking items (error, latency, and accuracy); (4) Oddball distractor stimulus P300 and N200 at PZ and FZ response; and (5) Oddball target stimulus P300 and N200 at PZ and FZ response. Results: The full model with all predictors accounted for between 15.2% and 21.5% of the variability in the balance measures. The number of TBI's) showed a negative association with the SOT2 score (p = 0.002). Additionally, longer times to complete TMT part B were shown to be related to a worse SOT1 score (p = 0.038). EEG distractors had the most influence on the SOT3 score (p = 0.019). Lastly, the SOT-composite and SOT5 scores were shown to be associated with longer inhibition latencies and errors (anti-saccade latency and error |
Audrey Vialatte; Eric Chabanat; Agnès Witko; Laure Pisella In: Cognitive Neuropsychology, pp. 1–28, 2023. @article{Vialatte2023, Some dyslexics cannot process multiple letters simultaneously. It has been argued that this reduced visuo-attentional (VA) letter span could result from poor reading ability and experience. Here, moving away from reading context, we showed that dyslexic group exhibited slower visual search than normal readers group for “symbols”, defined as graphic stimuli made up of separable visual features, but not for filled objects. Slowness in symbol visual search was explained by reduced VA field and atypical ocular behaviour when processing those letter-like stimuli and was associated with reduced VA letter span and impaired elementary visuo-spatial perception. Such a basic visual search deficit can hardly be attributed to poor reading ability and experience. Moreover, because it is specific to letter-like stimuli (i.e., “symbols”), it can specifically hinder reading acquisition. Symbol visual search can easily be tested in the pre-reading phase, opening up prospects for early risk detection and prevention of VA dyslexia. |
Lara Koch; Norbert Kathmann; Benedikt Reuter Lack of speeded disengagement from facial expressions of disgust in remitted major depressive disorder: Evidence from an eye-movement study Journal Article In: Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 160, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Koch2023a, Acute major depression is characterized by specific abnormalities in the way emotional material is attended to. In late stages of stimulus processing, clinically depressed and dysphoric individuals show difficulties to disengage attention from emotionally negative material. It is unclear, however, whether aberrant disengagement is a transitory attentional phenomenon tied to depressive symptoms, or whether it constitutes a more stable disposition that outlast the symptomatic episode. To address this issue, the current study examined 39 currently euthymic individuals previously affected by major depression (RMD) and 40 healthy control participants reporting no lifetime psychopathology (ND). We used a gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm designed to separately assess the attentional components of engagement and disengagement when viewing facial expressions of sadness, disgust and happiness. Never-depressed healthy participants, but not remitted euthymic individuals, showed speeded disengagement from facial expressions of disgust. We propose that the lack of this distinct acceleration in previously depressed but fully remitted individuals might reflect an attentional disposition that carries over to euthymic phases of the disease. On the other hand, a tendency to disengage quickly from areas in the visual field that convey social disdain could potentially act as a protective, possibly mood-stabilizing bias in resilient individuals. |
Josefine Waldthaler; Alexander Sperlich; Aylin König; Charlotte Stüssel; Frank Bremmer; Lars Timmermann; David Pedrosa In: NeuroImage: Clinical, vol. 37, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Waldthaler2023, While deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) improves motor functions in Parkinson's disease (PD), it may also increase impulsivity by interfering with the inhibition of reflexive responses. The aim of this study was to investigate if varying the pulse frequency of STN-DBS has a modulating effect on response inhibition and its neural correlates. For this purpose, 14 persons with PD repeated an antisaccade task in three stimulation settings (DBS off, high-frequency DBS (130 Hz), mid-frequency DBS (60 Hz)) in a randomized order, while eye movements and brain activity via high-density EEG were recorded. On a behavioral level, 130 Hz DBS stimulation had no effect on response inhibition measured as antisaccade error rate, while 60 Hz DBS induced a slight but significant reduction of directional errors compared with the DBS-off state and 130 Hz DBS. Further, stimulation with both frequencies decreased the onset latency of correct antisaccades, while increasing the latency of directional errors. Time-frequency domain analysis of the EEG data revealed that 60 Hz DBS was associated with an increase in preparatory theta power over a midfrontal region of interest compared with the off-DBS state which is generally regarded as a marker of increased cognitive control. While no significant differences in brain activity over mid- and lateral prefrontal regions of interest emerged between the 60 Hz and 130 Hz conditions, both stimulation frequencies were associated with a stronger midfrontal beta desynchronization during the mental preparation for correct antisaccades compared with DBS off-state which is discussed in the context of potentially enhanced proactive recruitment of the oculomotor network. Our preliminary findings suggest that mid-frequency STN-DBS may provide beneficial effects on response inhibition, while both 130 Hz- and 60 Hz STN-DBS may promote voluntary actions at the expense of slower reflexive responses. |
Carla A. Wall; Frederick Shic; Sreeja Varanasi; Jane E. Roberts Distinct social attention profiles in preschoolers with autism contrasted to fragile X syndrome Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 340–354, 2023. @article{Wall2023, Social attention is a critical skill for learning and development. Social attention difficulties are present in both non-syndromic autism spectrum disorder (nsASD) and fragile X syndrome (FXS), and our understanding of these difficulties is complicated by heterogeneity in both disorders, including co-occurring diagnoses like intellectual disability and social anxiety. Existing research largely utilizes a single index of social attention and rarely includes children with intellectual impairment or uses a cross-syndrome approach. This study investigated whether multi-trait social attention profiles including naturalistic initial eye contact, facial attention, and social scene attention differ in preschool children with nsASD and FXS matched on developmental ability (DQ) and contrasted to neurotypical (NT) controls. The relationship between DQ, ASD severity, and social anxiety and social attention profiles was also examined. Initial eye contact related to social scene attention, implicating that naturalistic social attention is consistent with responses during experimental conditions. Reduced eye contact and lower social scene attention characterized nsASD and FXS. Children with nsASD displayed less facial attention than FXS and NT children, who did not differ. Lower DQ and elevated ASD severity associated with decreased eye contact in nsASD and FXS, and lower DQ was associated with lower social scene attention in FXS. Sex, social anxiety, and age were not associated with social attention. These findings suggest social attention profiles of children with nsASD are highly similar to, yet distinct from, children with FXS. Children with nsASD may present with a global social attention deficit whereas FXS profiles may reflect context-dependent social avoidance. |
Eve C. Ayar; Michelle R. Heusser; Clara Bourrelly; Neeraj J. Gandhi Distinct context- and content- dependent population codes in superior colliculus during sensation and action Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 120, no. 40, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Ayar2023, Sensorimotor transformation is the process of first sensing an object in the environment and then producing a movement in response to that stimulus. For visually guided saccades, neurons in the superior colliculus (SC) emit a burst of spikes to register the appearance of stimulus, and many of the same neurons discharge another burst to initiate the eye movement. We investigated whether the neural signatures of sensation and action in SC depend on context. Spiking activity along the dorsoventral axis was recorded with a laminar probe as Rhesus monkeys generated saccades to the same stimulus location in tasks that require either executive control to delay saccade onset until permission is granted or the production of an immediate response to a target whose onset is predictable. Using dimensionality reduction and discriminability methods, we show that the subspaces occupied during the visual and motor epochs were both distinct within each task and differentiable across tasks. Single-unit analyses, in contrast, show that the movement-related activity of SC neurons was not different between tasks. These results demonstrate that statistical features in neural activity of simultaneously recorded ensembles provide more insight than single neurons. They also indicate that cognitive processes associated with task requirements are multiplexed in SC population activity during both sensation and action and that downstream structures could use this activity to extract context. Additionally, the entire manifolds associated with sensory and motor responses, respectively, may be larger than the subspaces explored within a certain set of experiments. |
Louise Catheryne Barne; Jonathan Giordano Decoding trans-saccadic prediction error Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 11, pp. 1933–1939, 2023. @article{Barne2023, We are constantly sampling our environment by moving our eyes, but our subjective experience of the world is stable and constant. Stimulus displacement during or shortly after a saccade often goes unnoticed, a phenomenon called the saccadic suppression of displacement. Although we fail to notice such displacements, our oculomotor system computes the prediction errors and adequately adjusts the gaze and future saccadic execution, a phenomenon known as saccadic adaptation. In the present study, we aimed to find a brain signature of the trans-saccadic prediction error that informs the motor system but not explicit perception. We asked participants (either sex) to report whether a visual target was displaced during a saccade while recording electroencephalography (EEG). Using multivariate pattern analysis, we were able to differentiate displace- ments from no displacements, even when participants failed to report the displacement. In other words, we found that trans- saccadic prediction error is represented in the EEG signal 100 ms after the displacement presentation, mainly in occipital and parieto-occipital channels, even in the absence of explicit perception of the displacement. |
Cesar Barquero; Jui-Tai Chen; Douglas P. Munoz; Chin-An Wang In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 187, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Barquero2023, Microsaccades that occur during periods of fixation are modulated by various cognitive processes and have an impact on visual processing. A network of brain areas is involved in microsaccade generation, including the superior colliculus and frontal eye field (FEF) which are involved in modulating microsaccade rate and direction after the appearance of a visual cue (referred to as microsaccade cueing modulation). Although the neural mechanisms underlying microsaccade cueing modulations have been demonstrated in monkeys, limited research has investigated a causal role of these areas in humans. By applying continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) over the right FEF and vertex, we investigated the role of human FEF in modulating microsaccade responses after the appearance of a visual target in a visual- and memory-delay saccade task. After target appearance, microsaccade rate was initially suppressed but then increased in both cTBS conditions. More importantly, in the visual-delay task, microsaccades after target appearance were directed to the ipsilateral side more often with FEF, compared to vertex stimulation. Moreover, microsaccades were directed towards the target location, then to the opposite location of the target in both tasks, with larger effects in the visual-, compared to, memory-delay task. This microsaccade direction modulation was delayed after FEF stimulation in the memory-delay task. Overall, some microsaccade cueing modulations were moderately disrupted after FEF cTBS, suggesting a causal role for involvement of the human FEF in microsaccade generation after presentation of salient stimuli. |
Mehdi Bejani; Elisa Luque-Buzo; Arsen Burlaka-Petrash; Jorge A. Gomez-Garcia; Julian D. Arias-Londono; F. Grandas-Perez; Jesus Grajal; Juan Ignacio Godino-Llorente Baseline wander removal applied to smooth pursuit eye movements from parkinsonian patients Journal Article In: IEEE Access, vol. 11, pp. 32119–32133, 2023. @article{Bejani2023, Prior studies aiming to parametrize the sequences obtained from the Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements (SPEM) of patients with Parkinson's disease are based on the manual extraction of cues of interest. This is because methods to automatically extract the relevant information are complex to implement and are constrained, in part, by the appearance of a baseline wander (BW). Thus, new methods are required for preprocessing the SPEM sequences to make the potential parameterisation procedures much more robust, removing the aforementioned BW. In this respect, the present study compares different BW removal methods applied to SPEM sequences based on several objective evaluation metrics. At the same time, it proposes a set of guidelines to estimate the ground truth that is required for comparison purposes. Data were collected using a high-speed video-based eye-tracking device. 52 patients and 60 controls and 12 young participants were enrolled in the study. The ground truth required to compare the different BW removal techniques was manually delineated according to a predefined protocol. Seven methods were developed to remove the BW, and four objective metrics were used to evaluate the results. According to the results, a method based on the Empirical Wavelet Transform provided the best performance removing the BW. Furthermore, the objective and subjective results show that potential asymmetries between left and right eye movements are solved by removing the BW. Regardless of the techniques used, BW removal is revealed to be a crucial step for any autonomous SPEM processing tool. |
Sanne Böing; Jasper H. Fabius; Marjoleine Hakkenberg; Tanja C. W. Nijboer; Stefan Van der Stigchel More (corrective) consecutive saccades after a lesion to the posterior parietal cortex Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 58, no. 7, pp. 3650–3670, 2023. @article{Boeing2023, To reach a target, primary saccades (S1s) are often followed by (corrective) consecutive saccades (S2, and potentially S3, S4, S5), which are based on retinal and extraretinal feedback. Processing these extraretinal signals was found to be significantly impaired by lesions to the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Recent studies, however, added a more nuanced view to the role of the PPC, where patients with PPC lesions still used extraretinal signals for S2s and perceptual judgements (Fabius et al., 2020; Rath-Wilson & Guitton, 2015). Hence, it seems that a PPC lesion is not disrupting extraretinal processing per se. Yet, a lesion might still result in less reliable processing of extraretinal signals. Here, we investigated whether this lower reliability manifests as decreased or delayed S2 initiation. Patients with PPC lesions (n = 7) and controls (n = 26) performed a prosaccade task where the target either remained visible or was removed after S1 onset. When S1 is removed, accurate S2s (corrections of S1 error) rely solely on extraretinal signals. We analysed S2 quantity and timing using linear mixed-effects modelling and additive hazards analyses. Patients demonstrated slower S1 execution and lower S1 amplitudes than controls, but their S2s still compensated the S1 undershoot, also when they only relied on extraretinal information. Surprisingly, patients showed an increased amount of S2s. This deviation from control behaviour can be seen as suboptimal, but given the decreased accuracy of the primary saccade, it could be optimal for patients to employ more (corrective) consecutive saccades to overcome this inaccuracy. |
Clara Bourrelly; Corentin Massot; Neeraj J. Gandhi Rapid input-output transformation between local field potential and spiking activity during sensation but not action in the superior colliculus Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 22, pp. 4047–4061, 2023. @article{Bourrelly2023, Sensorimotor transformation is the sequential process of registering a sensory signal in the environment and then responding with the relevant movement at an appropriate time. For visually guided eye movements, neural signatures in the form of spiking activity of neurons have been extensively studied along the dorsoventral axis of the superior colliculus (SC). In contrast, the local field potential (LFP), which represents the putative input to a region, remains largely unexplored in the SC. We therefore compared amplitude levels and onset times of both spike bursts and LFP modulations recorded simultaneously with a laminar probe along the dorsoventral axis of SC in 3 male monkeys performing the visually guided delayed saccade task. Both signals displayed a gradual transition from sensory activity in the superficial layers to a predominantly motor response in the deeper layers, although the transition from principally sensory to mostly motor response occurred;500 lm deeper for the LFP. For the sensory response, LFP modulation preceded spike burst onset by,5 ms in the superficial and intermediate layers and only when data were analyzed on a trial-by-trial basis. The motor burst in the spiking activity led LFP modulation by.25 ms in the deeper layers. The results reveal a fast and efficient input-output transformation between LFP modulation and spike burst in the visually responsive layers activity during sensation but not during action. The spiking pattern observed during the movement phase is likely dominated by intracollicular processing that is not captured in the LFP. |
Maximilian Davide Broda; Theresa Haddad; Benjamin Haas Quick, eyes! Isolated upper face regions but not artificial features elicit rapid saccades Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Broda2023, Human faces elicit faster saccades than objects or animals, resonating with the great importance of faces for our species. The underlying mechanisms are largely unclear. Here, we test two hypotheses based on previous findings. First, ultra-rapid saccades toward faces may not depend on the presence of the whole face, but the upper face region containing the eye region. Second, ultra-rapid saccades toward faces (and possibly face parts) may emerge from our extensive experience with this stimulus and thus extend to glasses and masks – artificial features frequently encountered as part of a face. To test these hypotheses, we asked 43 participants to complete a saccadic choice task, which contrasted images of whole, upper and lower faces, face masks, and glasses with car images. The resulting data confirmed ultra-rapid saccades for isolated upper face regions, but not for artificial facial features. |
Serena Castellotti; Martin Szinte; Maria Michela Del Viva; Anna Montagnini Saccadic trajectories deviate toward or away from optimally informative visual features Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 26, no. 8, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Castellotti2023, The saccades' path is influenced by visual distractors, making their trajectory curve away or toward them. Previous research suggested that the more salient the distractor, the more pronounced is the curvature. We investigate the saliency of spatial visual features, predicted by a constrained maximum entropy model to be optimal or non-optimal information carriers in fast vision, by using them as distractors in a saccadic task. Their effect was compared to that of luminance-based control distractors. Optimal features evoke a larger saccadic curvature compared to non-optimal features, and the magnitude and direction of deviation change as a function of the delay between distractor and saccade onset. Effects were similar to those found with high-luminance versus low-luminance distractors. Therefore, model-predicted information optimal features interfere with target-oriented saccades, following a dynamic attraction–repulsion pattern. This suggests that the visuo-oculomotor system rapidly and automatically processes optimally informative features while programming visually guided eye movements. |
Hatice Eraslan Boz; Koray Koçoğlu; Müge Akkoyun; Işıl Yağmur Tüfekci; Merve Ekin; Pınar Özçelik; Gülden Akdal In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, pp. 1–22, 2023. @article{EraslanBoz2023b, Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia is a degenerative illness that is characterized by a gradual decline in cognitive abilities. Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is seen as a precursor to AD. The changes in antisaccade performance that can be seen in MCI may provide important clues in the early detection of AD. Therefore, the antisaccade deficits in AD and aMCI remain a research question. This study aimed to examine antisaccade responses and the relationship between antisaccade and cognitive function in AD, aMCI, and healthy controls (HC). This study included 30 patients with early-stage AD, 34 with aMCI, and 32 HC. Patients with AD showed higher rates of uncorrected error, anticipatory saccades and corrected errors, as well as decreased correct saccade rates, and shortened saccade latency compared to aMCI and HC in this study. Patients with aMCI exhibited increased rates of express saccades relative to HC. The antisaccade task and cognitive domains were found to be significantly related. Our study showed that the rate of correct saccades has the capacity to distinguish AD from HC with 87% sensitivity and 86% specificity (AUC = 0.93, p < 0.001). In addition, the rate of uncorrected errors was found to be capable of distinguishing AD from HC with 84% sensitivity and 83% specificity (AUC = 0.91, p < 0.001). This study presented promising findings that these parameters can be used clinically to differentiate AD and aMCI from healthy older individuals. |
Jasper H. Fabius; Alessio Fracasso; Michele Deodato; David Melcher; Stefan Van der Stigchel Bilateral increase in MEG planar gradients prior to saccade onset Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Fabius2023, Every time we move our eyes, the retinal locations of objects change. To distinguish the changes caused by eye movements from actual external motion of the objects, the visual system is thought to anticipate the consequences of eye movements (saccades). Single neuron recordings have indeed demonstrated changes in receptive fields before saccade onset. Although some EEG studies with human participants have also demonstrated a pre-saccadic increased potential over the hemisphere that will process a stimulus after a saccade, results have been mixed. Here, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate the timing and lateralization of visually evoked planar gradients before saccade onset. We modelled the gradients from trials with both a saccade and a stimulus as the linear combination of the gradients from two conditions with either only a saccade or only a stimulus. We reasoned that any residual gradients in the condition with both a saccade and a stimulus must be uniquely linked to visually-evoked neural activity before a saccade. We observed a widespread increase in residual planar gradients. Interestingly, this increase was bilateral, showing activity both contralateral and ipsilateral to the stimulus, i.e. over the hemisphere that would process the stimulus after saccade offset. This pattern of results is consistent with predictive pre-saccadic changes involving both the current and the future receptive fields involved in processing an attended object, well before the start of the eye movement. The active, sensorimotor coupling of vision and the oculomotor system may underlie the seamless subjective experience of stable and continuous perception. |
Yunwei Fan; Li Li; Ping Chu; Qian Wu; Yuan Wang; Wen Hong Cao; Ningdong Li Clinical analysis of eye movement-based data in the medical diagnosis of amblyopia Journal Article In: Methods, vol. 213, pp. 26–32, 2023. @article{Fan2023a, Amblyopia is an abnormal visual processing-induced developmental disorder of the central nervous system that affects static and dynamic vision, as well as binocular visual function. Currently, changes in static vision in one eye are the gold standard for amblyopia diagnosis. However, there have been few comprehensive analyses of changes in dynamic vision, especially eye movement, among children with amblyopia. Here, we proposed an optimization scheme involving a video eye tracker combined with an “artificial eye” for comprehensive examination of eye movement in children with amblyopia; we sought to improve the diagnostic criteria for amblyopia and provide theoretical support for practical treatment. The resulting eye movement data were used to construct a deep learning approach for diagnostic and predictive applications. Through efforts to manage the uncooperativeness of children with strabismus who could not complete the eye movement assessment, this study quantitatively and objectively assessed the clinical implications of eye movement characteristics in children with amblyopia. Our results indicated that an amblyopic eye is always in a state of adjustment, and thus is not “lazy.” Additionally, we found that the eye movement parameters of amblyopic eyes and eyes with normal vision are significantly different. Finally, we identified eye movement parameters that can be used to supplement and optimize the diagnostic criteria for amblyopia, providing a diagnostic basis for evaluation of binocular visual function. |
Xinhui Fei; Yanqin Zhang; Deyi Kong; Qitang Huang; Minhua Wang; Jianwen Dong Quantitative model study of the psychological recovery benefit of landscape environment based on eye movement tracking technology Journal Article In: Sustainability, vol. 15, no. 14, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Fei2023, From the perspective of landscape and human health, we use the Self-Rating Restoration Scale (SRRS) as a tool to explore the mental health restoration benefits brought by a landscape environment to individuals and explore the characteristics of individual movement behavior when viewing the landscape through the eye movement tracking technology. We selected average blink duration, average gaze length, average saccade amplitude, blink number, number of fixation points, saccade number, and average pupil diameter as experimental indicators for data monitoring. Based on the eye movement heat map obtained by data visualization processing and the results of correlation analysis, we summarized the eye movement behavior characteristics of individuals when viewing the restorative landscape. We try to construct a quantitative evaluation model of the landscape mental recovery benefit with the objective eye movement index as the independent variable through the method of curve estimation. The study results show that individual eye movement behavior is related to the landscape type and the level of psychological recovery is also different. (1)The more singular that the constituent elements are, the more widespread and concentrated the regional distribution of individual attention areas, and the relative psychological recovery benefit is relatively weak. The more complex that the constituent elements are, the more scattered and smaller the individual interest area, and the psychological recovery benefit is better. Brightly colored, dynamic landscapes are easier to form areas of interest to improve the psychological response to the human body. (2) The psychological recovery benefit of the landscape is directly proportional to the changing trend of the average blink duration, number of fixation points, and number of saccades and is inversely proportional to the changing trend of the average gaze length. (3) The objective eye movement index of average blink duration can quantitatively predict the psychological recovery benefit value of the landscape environment. The number of fixation points, the number of saccades, and the average fixation length could predict the psychological recovery benefits of the landscape, while the other indicators had no prediction effect. |
Maria Feldmann; Jessica Borer; Walter Knirsch; Moritz M. Daum; Stephanie Wermelinger; Beatrice Latal Atypical gaze-following behaviour in infants with congenital heart disease Journal Article In: Early Human Development, vol. 181, pp. 1–7, 2023. @article{Feldmann2023a, Background: Neurodevelopmental impairments are the most prevalent non-cardiac long-term sequelae in children with complex congenital heart disease (CHD). Deficits include the social-emotional and social-cognitive domains. Little is known about the predecessors of social-cognitive development in infants with CHD during the first year of life. Gaze-following behaviour can be used to measure early social-cognitive abilities. Aims: To assess gaze-following development in infants with CHD compared to healthy controls. Study design: Prospective cohort study. Participants: Twenty-three infants who underwent neonatal correction for CHD and 84 healthy controls. Outcome measures: Gaze-following behaviour was assessed by eye tracking at 6 and 12 months. Difference scores for first fixation, fixation frequency and fixation duration towards the gaze-cued object were calculated across 6 trials and compared between groups at both testing time points while adjusting for known confounders. Linear mixed models were calculated to assess the longitudinal trajectory of gaze-following development while accounting for the nested and dependent data structure. Results: At 6 months, no difference in gaze-following behaviour between CHD and healthy controls was found. At 12 months, fixation frequency towards the gaze-cued was lower and looking duration was shorter in CHD compared to controls (p = 0.0077; p = 0.0068). Infants with CHD showed less increase with age in the fixation frequency towards the congruent object (p = 0.041) compared to controls. Conclusion: During the first year of life, gaze-following development diverges in infants with CHD compared to healthy controls. Further research is needed to investigate the clinical relevance of these findings and the association with later social-cognitive development. |
Heather Fielding-Gebhardt; Shannon E. Kelly; Kathryn E. Unruh; Lauren M. Schmitt; Stormi L. Pulver; Pravin Khemani; Matthew W. Mosconi Sensorimotor and inhibitory control in aging FMR1 premutation carriers Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{FieldingGebhardt2023, Aging FMR1 premutation carriers are at risk of developing neurodegenerative disorders, including fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS), and there is a need to identify biomarkers that can aid in identification and treatment of these disorders. While FXTAS is more common in males than females, females can develop the disease, and some evidence suggests that patterns of impairment may differ across sexes. Few studies include females with symptoms of FXTAS, and as a result, little information is available on key phenotypes for tracking disease risk and progression in female premutation carriers. Our aim was to examine quantitative motor and cognitive traits in aging premutation carriers. We administered oculomotor tests of visually guided/reactive saccades (motor) and antisaccades (cognitive control) in 22 premutation carriers (73% female) and 32 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Neither reactive saccade latency nor accuracy differed between groups. FMR1 premutation carriers showed increased antisaccade latencies relative to controls, both when considering males and females together and when analyzing females separately. Reduced saccade accuracy and increased antisaccade latency each were associated with more severe clinically rated neuromotor impairments. Findings indicate that together male and female premutation carriers show a reduced ability to rapidly exert volitional control over prepotent responses and that quantitative differences in oculomotor behavior, including control of visually guided and antisaccades, may track with FXTAS – related degeneration in male and female premutation carriers. |
Nick Fogt; Andrew J. Toole; Xiangrui Li; Emmanuel Owusu; Steven T. T. Manning; Marjean T. Kulp Functional magnetic resonance imaging activation for different vergence eye movement subtypes Journal Article In: Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 93–104, 2023. @article{Fogt2023, Introduction: Maddox suggested that there were four convergence subtypes, each driven by a different stimulus. The purpose of this study was to assess the neural correlates for accommodative convergence, proximal convergence (convergence stimulus provided), disparity convergence and voluntary convergence (no specific convergence stimulus provided) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods: Ten subjects (mean age = 24.4 years) with normal binocular vision participated. The blood oxygenation level- dependent (BOLD) signals of the brain from fMRI scans were measured when subjects made vergence eye movements while: (1) alternately viewing letters monocularly where one eye viewed through a −2.00 D lens, (2) alternately viewing Difference of Gaussian targets monocularly at distance and near, (3) viewing random dot stereograms with increasing disparity and (4) voluntarily converging the eyes with binocular viewing. Results: The accommodative convergence paradigm resulted in activation on the right side in the right fusiform cortex and the right middle occipital cortex. The proximal convergence stimulus mainly activated areas in the right occipital lobe. The disparity stimulus activated areas in the left occipital cortex and the left frontal cortex. Finally, the voluntary convergence paradigm resulted in activation primarily in the occipital lobe and mostly bilaterally. Conclusion: The accommodative, proximal, disparity and voluntary convergence paradigms resulted in activation in unique areas in the brain with functional MRI. Activation was found in more areas in the proximal and voluntary conditions compared with the accommodative and disparity conditions. |
Alessio Fracasso; Antimo Buonocore; Ziad M. Hafed Peri-saccadic orientation identification performance and visual neural sensitivity are higher in the upper visual field Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 41, pp. 6884–6897, 2023. @article{Fracasso2023, Visual neural processing is distributed among a multitude of sensory and sensory-motor brain areas exhibiting varying degrees of functional specializations and spatial representational anisotropies. Such diversity raises the question of how perceptual performance is determined, at any one moment in time, during natural active visual behavior. Here, exploiting a known dichotomy between the primary visual cortex and superior colliculus in representing either the upper or lower visual fields, we asked whether peri-saccadic orientation identification performance is dominated by one or the other spatial anisotropy. Humans (48 participants, 29 females) reported the orientation of peri-saccadic upper visual field stimuli significantly better than lower visual field stimuli, unlike their performance during steady-state gaze fixation, and contrary to expected perceptual superiority in the lower visual field in the absence of saccades. Consistent with this, peri-saccadic superior colliculus visual neural responses in two male rhesus macaque monkeys were also significantly stronger in the upper visual field than in the lower visual field. Thus, peri-saccadic orientation identification performance is more in line with oculomotor, rather than visual, map spatial anisotropies. |
Sharavanan Ganesan; Natalia Melnik; Elena Azanon; Stefan Pollmann A gaze-contingent saccadic re-referencing training with simulated central vision loss Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Ganesan2023, Patients with central vision loss (CVL) adopt an eccentric retinal location for fixation, a preferred retinal location (PRL), to compensate for vision loss at the fovea. Although most patients with CVL are able to rapidly use a PRL instead of the fovea, saccadic re-referencing to a PRL develops slowly.Without re-referencing, saccades land the saccade target in the scotoma. This results in corrective saccades and leads to inefficient visual exploration. Here, we tested a new method to train saccadic re-referencing. Healthy participants performed gaze-contingent visual search tasks with simulated central scotoma in which participants had to fixate targets with an experimenter-defined forced retinal location (FRL). In experiment 1, we compared single-target search and foraging search tasks in the course of five training sessions. Results showed that both tasks improved the efficiency of gaze sequences and led to saccadic re-referencing to the FRL. In experiment 2, we trained participants extensively for 25 sessions, both with and without a gaze-contingent FRL-marker visible during training. After extensive training, observers' performance approached that of foveal vision. Thus, gaze-contingent FRL-fixation may become an efficient tool for saccadic re-referencing training in patients with central vision loss. |
Caroline Giuricich; Robert J. Green; Heather Jordan; Mazyar Fallah Target–distractor competition modulates saccade trajectories in space and object space Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Giuricich2023, Saccade planning and execution can be affected by a multitude of factors present in a target selection task. Recent studies have shown that the similarity between a target and nearby distractors affects the curvature of saccade trajectories, because of target–distractor competition. To further understand the nature of this competition, we varied the distance between and the similarity of complex target and distractor objects in a delayed match-to-sample task to examine their effects on human saccade trajectories and better understand the underlying neural circuitry. For trials with short saccadic reaction times (SRTs) when target–distractor competition is still active, the distractor is attractive and saccade trajectories are deviated toward the distractor. We found a robust effect of distance consistent with saccade vector averaging, whereas the effect of similarity suggested the existence of an object-based suppressive surround. At longer SRTs, there was sufficient time for competition between the objects to complete and the distractor to be repulsive, which resulted in saccade trajectory deviations away from the distractor exhibiting the effects of a spatial suppressive surround. In terms of similarity, as the target–distractor similarity decreased, the initial saccade angle shifted toward the target, reflecting stronger distractor inhibition. There were no interactions between distance and similarity at any point in the time course of target–distractor competition. Together, saccade trajectories reflect target–distractor competition that is affected independently by both spatial and object space suppressive surrounds. The differences in saccade trajectories at short and long SRTs distinguish between active and completed decision-making processes. |
Alexander Goettker; Nils Borgerding; Linus Leeske; Karl R. Gegenfurtner Cues for predictive eye movements in naturalistic scenes Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 10, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Goettker2023, We previously compared following of the same trajectories with eye movements, but either as an isolated targets or embedded in a naturalistic scene-in this case, the movement of a puck in an ice hockey game. We observed that the oculomotor system was able to leverage the contextual cues available in the naturalistic scene to produce predictive eye movements. In this study, we wanted to assess which factors are critical for achieving this predictive advantage by manipulating four factors: the expertise of the viewers, the amount of available peripheral information, and positional and kinematic cues. The more peripheral information became available (by manipulating the area of the video that was visible), the better the predictions of all observers. However, expert ice hockey fans were consistently better at predicting than novices and used peripheral information more effectively for predictive saccades. Artificial cues about player positions did not lead to a predictive advantage, whereas impairing the causal structure of kinematic cues by playing the video in reverse led to a severe impairment. When videos were flipped vertically to introduce more difficult kinematic cues, predictive behavior was comparable to watching the original videos. Together, these results demonstrate that, when contextual information is available in naturalistic scenes, the oculomotor system is successfully integrating them and is not relying only on low-level information about the target trajectory. Critical factors for successful prediction seem to be the amount of available information, experience with the stimuli, and the availability of intact kinematic cues for player movements. |
Harold H. Greene; Vaibhav A. Diwadkar; James M. Brown Regularities in vertical saccadic metrics: New insights, and future perspectives Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Greene2023, Introduction: Asymmetries in processing by the healthy brain demonstrate regularities that facilitate the modeling of brain operations. The goal of the present study was to determine asymmetries in saccadic metrics during visual exploration, devoid of confounding clutter in the visual field. Methods: Twenty healthy adults searched for a small, low-contrast gaze-contingent target on a blank computer screen. The target was visible, only if eye fixation was within a 5 deg. by 5 deg. area of the target's location. Results: Replicating previously-reported asymmetries, repeated measures contrast analyses indicated that up-directed saccades were executed earlier, were smaller in amplitude, and had greater probability than down-directed saccades. Given that saccade velocities are confounded by saccade amplitudes, it was also useful to investigate saccade kinematics of visual exploration, as a function of vertical saccade direction. Saccade kinematics were modeled for each participant, as a square root relationship between average saccade velocity (i.e., average velocity between launching and landing of a saccade) and corresponding saccade amplitude (Velocity = S*[Saccade Amplitude]0.5). A comparison of the vertical scaling parameter (S) for up- and down-directed saccades showed that up-directed saccades tended to be slower than down-directed ones. Discussion: To motivate future research, an ecological theory of asymmetric pre-saccadic inhibition was presented to explain the collection of vertical saccadic regularities. For example, given that the theory proposes strong inhibition for the releasing of reflexive down-directed prosaccades (cued by an attracting peripheral target below eye fixation), and weak inhibition for the releasing of up-directed prosaccades (cued by an attracting peripheral target above eye fixation), a prediction for future studies is longer reaction times for vertical anti-saccade cues above eye fixation. Finally, the present study with healthy individuals demonstrates a rationale for further study of vertical saccades in psychiatric disorders, as bio-markers for brain pathology. |
Leslie Guadron; Samuel A. Titchener; Carla J. Abbott; Lauren N. Ayton; John Opstal; Matthew A. Petoe; Jeroen Goossens The saccade main sequence in patients with retinitis pigmentosa and advanced age-related macular degeneration Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Guadron2023, PURPOSE. Most eye-movement studies in patients with visual field defects have examined the strategies that patients use while exploring a visual scene, but they have not investigated saccade kinematics. In healthy vision, saccade trajectories follow the remarkably stereotyped “main sequence”: saccade duration increases linearly with saccade amplitude; peak velocity also increases linearly for small amplitudes, but approaches a saturation limit for large amplitudes. Recent theories propose that these relationships reflect the brain's attempt to optimize vision when planning eye movements. Therefore, in patients with bilateral retinal damage, saccadic behavior might differ to optimize vision under the constraints imposed by the visual field defects. METHODS. We compared saccadic behavior of patients with central vision loss, due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and patients with peripheral vision loss, due to retinitis pigmentosa (RP), to that of controls with normal vision (NV) using a horizontal saccade task. RESULTS. Both patient groups demonstrated deficits in saccade reaction times and target localization behavior, as well as altered saccade kinematics. Saccades were generally slower and the shape of the velocity profiles were often atypical, especially in the patients with RP. In the patients with AMD, the changes were far less dramatic. For both groups, saccade kinematics were affected most when the target was in the subjects' blind field. CONCLUSIONS. We conclude that defects of the central and peripheral retina have distinct effects on the saccade main sequence, and that visual inputs play an important role in planning the kinematics of a saccade. |
Diane C. Mézière; Lili Yu; Genevieve McArthur; Erik D. Reichle; Titus Malsburg Scanpath regularity as an index of reading comprehension Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 79–100, 2023. @article{Meziere2023, Purpose: Recent research on the potential of using eye-tracking to measure reading comprehension ability suggests that the relationship between standard eye-tracking measures and reading comprehension is influenced by differences in task demands between comprehension assessments. We compared standard eye-tracking measures and scanpath regularity as predictors of reading comprehension scores. Method: We used a dataset in which 79 participants (mean age: 22 years, 82% females, 76% monolingual English speakers) were administered three widely-used reading comprehension assessments with varying task demands while their eye movements were monitored: the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension; (YARC), the Gray Oral Reading Test; (GORT-5), and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test; (WRAT-4). Results: Results showed that scanpath regularity measures, similarly to standard eye-tracking measures, were influenced by differences in task demands between the three tests. Nevertheless, both types of eye-tracking measures made unique contributions as predictors of comprehension and the best set of predictors included both standard eye-tracking measures and at least one scanpath measure across tests. Conclusion: The results provide evidence that scanpaths capture differences in eye-movement patterns missed by standard eye-tracking measures. Overall, the results highlight the effect of task demands on eye-movement behavior and suggest that reading goals and task demands need to be considered when interpreting eye-tracking data. |
Diane C. Mézière; Lili Yu; Erik D. Reichle; Titus Malsburg; Genevieve McArthur Using eye-tracking measures to predict reading comprehension Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 425–449, 2023. @article{Meziere2023a, This study examined the potential of eye-tracking as a tool for assessing reading comprehension. We administered three widely used reading comprehension tests with varying task demands to 79 typical adult readers while monitoring their eye movements. In the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC), participants were given passages of text to read silently, followed by comprehension questions. In the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT-5), participants were given passages of text to read aloud, followed by comprehension questions. In the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4), participants were asked to provide a missing word in sentences that they read silently (i.e., a cloze task). Linear models predicting comprehension scores from eye-tracking measures yielded different results for the three tests. Eye-tracking measures explained significantly more variance than reading-speed data for the YARC (four times better), GORT (three times better), and the WRAT (1.3 time better). Importantly, there was no common strong predictor for all three tests. These results support growing recognition that reading comprehension tests do not measure the same cognitive processes, and that participants adapt their reading strategies to the tests' varying task demands. This study also suggests that eye-tracking may provide a useful alternative for measuring reading comprehension. |