Oculomotor deficits in children with sensory processing difficulties.

Background: Atypically developing children often present with a variety of sensory processing difficulties which have been proposed to reflect abnormal development of pathways integrating sensation and action. A brain system in which the process of sensorimotor integration is particularly well understood is the oculomotor system, but no studies to date have used computerised eye tracking to assess eye movements in children with sensory processing difficulties.

Method: Ten children with sensory processing difficulties completed a battery of oculomotor tasks comprising pro-saccades, anti-saccades, smooth pursuit tracking and sustained fixation.

Gaze-speech coordination during social interaction in Parkinson's disease.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) can affect social interaction and communication as well as motor and cognitive processes. Speech is affected in PD, as is the control of voluntary eye movements which are thought to play an important role in 'turn taking' in conversation.

Aims: This study aimed to measure eye movements during spoken conversation in PD to assess whether differences in patterns of eye gaze are linked to disrupted turn taking and impaired communication efficiency.

Patient-reported symptoms and experience following Guillain-Barré syndrome and related conditions: Questionnaire development and validation.

Background: Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare inflammatory peripheral nerve disorder with variable recovery. Evidence is lacking on experiences of people with GBS and measurement of these experiences.

Objective: We aimed to develop and validate an instrument to measure experiences of people with GBS.

The effect of directional social cues on saccadic eye movements in Parkinson's disease.

There is growing interest in how social processes and behaviour might be affected in Parkinson's disease. A task which has been widely used to assess how people orient attention in response to social cues is the spatial cueing task. Socially relevant directional cues, such as a picture of someone gazing or pointing to the left or the right have been shown to cause orienting of visual attention in the cued direction.

Deficits in saccadic eye movements differ between subtypes of patients with mild cognitive impairment.

: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is known to be heterogeneous in its cognitive features and course of progression. Whilst memory impairment is characteristic of amnestic MCI (aMCI), cognitive deficits other than memory can occur in both aMCI and non-amnestic MCI (naMCI) and accurate assessment of the subtypes of MCI is difficult for clinicians without the application of extensive neuropsychological testing. In this study, we examine metrics derived from recording of reflexive and voluntary saccadic eye movements as a potential alternative method for discriminating between subtypes and assessing cognitive functions in MCI.

Patients' experiences and perceptions of Guillain-Barré syndrome: A systematic review and meta-synthesis of qualitative research.

Background: Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an immune-mediated polyradiculoneuropathy, with an incidence of 1-2/100,000 per year. Its severity is variable, ranging from very mild cases with brief weakness to severe paralysis, leading to inability to breathe independently, or even death. Currently there is limited evidence exploring the experiences of GBS patients.

Applying the British picture vocabulary scale to estimate premorbid cognitive ability in adults.

Estimating premorbid cognitive ability is an essential part of assessment as well as being an important consideration in research. The most widely used approach to premorbid assessment, The National Adult Reading Test (NART), relies on word reading ability. However, this can be problematic in patients where communication is impaired.

Exploring the experiences of having Guillain-Barré Syndrome: A qualitative interview study.

Background: Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare inflammatory disorder affecting the peripheral nerves. Although typically there is full neurological recovery, some people continue to experience residual physical, psychological or social problems longer term. Evidence describing the experiences of people with GBS is limited.

Eye Movements in Neuropsychological Tasks.

This chapter reviews how recording and analysis of eye movements have been applied to understanding cognitive functioning in patients with neurological disease. Measures derived from the performance of instructed eye movement tests such as the anti-saccade and memory-guided saccade tasks have been shown to be associated with cognitive test performance and the early stages of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Other researchers have taken an ecological approach and recorded the uninstructed pattern of saccades made by patients during performance of established neuropsychological tasks.

Eye Movements in the "Morris Maze" Spatial Working Memory Task Reveal Deficits in Strategic Planning.

Analysis of eye movements can provide insights into processes underlying performance of cognitive tasks. We recorded eye movements in healthy participants and people with idiopathic Parkinson disease during a token foraging task based on the spatial working memory component of the widely used Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery. Participants selected boxes (using a mouse click) to reveal hidden tokens.

Mind Your Step: the Effects of Mobile Phone Use on Gaze Behavior in Stair Climbing.

Stair walking is a hazardous activity and a common cause of fatal and non-fatal falls. Previous studies have assessed the role of eye movements in stair walking by asking people to repeatedly go up and down stairs in quiet and controlled conditions, while the role of peripheral vision was examined by giving participants specific fixation instructions or working memory tasks. We here extend this research to stair walking in a natural environment with other people present on the stairs and a now common secondary task: using one's mobile phone.

The effect of and polymorphisms on executive function and the impact of early life stress.

Introduction: Previous research has indicated that variation in genes encoding catechol-O-methyltransferase () and dopamine receptor D2 () may influence cognitive function and that this may confer vulnerability to the development of mental health disorders such as schizophrenia. However, increasing evidence suggests environmental factors such as early life stress may interact with genetic variants in affecting these cognitive outcomes. This study investigated the effect of and polymorphisms on executive function and the impact of early life stress in healthy adults.

The developmental trajectory of attentional orienting to socio-biological cues.

It has been proposed that the orienting of attention in the same direction as another's point of gaze relies on innate brain mechanisms which are present from birth, but direct evidence relating to the influence of eye gaze cues on attentional orienting in young children is limited. In two experiments, 137 children aged 3-10 years old performed an adapted pro-saccade task with centrally presented uninformative eye gaze, finger pointing and arrow pre-cues which were either congruent or incongruent with the direction of target presentations. When the central cue overlapped with presentation of the peripheral target (Experiment 1), children up to 5 years old had difficulty disengaging fixation from central fixation in order to saccade to the target.

Multi-modal representation of effector modality in frontal cortex during rule switching.

We report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study which investigated whether brain areas involved in updating task rules within the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex show activity related to the modality of motor response used in the task. Participants performed a rule switching task using different effector modalities. In some blocks participants responded with left/right button presses, whilst in other blocks left/right saccades were required.

Intranasal inhalation of oxytocin improves face processing in developmental prosopagnosia.

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is characterised by a severe lifelong impairment in face recognition. In recent years it has become clear that DP affects a substantial number of people, yet little work has attempted to improve face processing in these individuals. Intriguingly, recent evidence suggests that intranasal inhalation of the hormone oxytocin can improve face processing in unimpaired participants, and we investigated whether similar findings might be noted in DP.

Application of the ex-Gaussian function to the effect of the word blindness suggestion on Stroop task performance suggests no word blindness.

The aim of the present paper was to apply the ex-Gaussian function to data reported by Parris et al. (2012) given its utility in studies involving the Stroop task. Parris et al.

Learning and switching between stimulus-saccade associations in Parkinson's disease.

Making flexible associations between what we see and what we do is important for many everyday tasks. Previous work in patients with focal lesions has shown that the control of saccadic eye movements in such contexts relies on a network of areas in the frontal cerebral cortex. These regions are reciprocally connected with structures in the basal ganglia although the contribution of these sub-cortical structures to oculomotor control in complex tasks is not well understood.

Facilitating goal-oriented behaviour in the Stroop task: when executive control is influenced by automatic processing.

A portion of Stroop interference is thought to arise from a failure to maintain goal-oriented behaviour (or goal neglect). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether goal- relevant primes could enhance goal maintenance and reduce the Stroop interference effect. Here it is shown that primes related to the goal of responding quickly in the Stroop task (e.

Temporal constraints of the word blindness posthypnotic suggestion on Stroop task performance.

The present work investigated possible temporal constraints on the posthypnotic word blindness suggestion effect. In a completely within-subjects and counterbalanced design 19 highly suggestible individuals performed the Stroop task both with and without a posthypnotic suggestion that they would be unable to read the word dimension of the Stroop stimulus, both when response-stimulus interval (RSI) was short (500 ms) or equivalent to previous studies (3500 ms). The suggestion reduced Stroop interference in the short RSI condition (54 vs.

Act quickly, decide later: long-latency visual processing underlies perceptual decisions but not reflexive behavior.

Humans largely guide their behavior by their visual representation of the world. Recent studies have shown that visual information can trigger behavior within 150 msec, suggesting that visually guided responses to external events, in fact, precede conscious awareness of those events. However, is such a view correct? By using a texture discrimination task, we show that the brain relies on long-latency visual processing in order to guide perceptual decisions.

Positive and negative emotion enhances the processing of famous faces in a semantic judgment task.

Previous work has consistently reported a facilitatory influence of positive emotion in face recognition (e.g., D'Argembeau, Van der Linden, Comblain, & Etienne, 2003).