scholarly journals Lexical Processes and Eye Movements in Neglect Dyslexia

2002 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe di Pellegrino ◽  
Elisabetta Làdavas ◽  
Claudio Galletti

Neglect dyslexia is a disturbance in the allocation of spatial attention over a letter string following unilateral brain damage. Patients with this condition may fail to read letters on the contralesional side of an orthographic string. In some of these cases, reading is better with words than with non-words. This word superiority effect has received a variety of explanations that differ, among other things, with regard to the spatial distribution of attention across the letter string during reading. The primary goal of the present study was to explore the interaction between attention and lexical processes by recording eye movements in a patient (F.C.) with severe left neglect dyslexia who was required to read isolated word and non-word stimuli of various length.F.C.’s ocular exploration of orthographic stimuli was highly sensitive to the lexical status of the letter string. We found that: (1) the location to which F.C. directed his initial saccade (obtained approximately 230 ms post-stimulus onset) differed between word and non-word stimuli; (2) the patient spent a greater amount of time fixating the contralesional side of word than non-word strings. Moreover, we also found that F.C. failed to identify the left letters of a string despite having fixated them, thus showing a clear dissociation between eye movement responses and conscious access to orthographic stimuli.Our data suggest the existence of multiple interactions between lexical, attentional and eye movement systems that occur from very initial stages of visual word recognition.

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (6) ◽  
pp. 2027-2032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper H. Fabius ◽  
Alessio Fracasso ◽  
Tanja C. W. Nijboer ◽  
Stefan Van der Stigchel

Humans move their eyes several times per second, yet we perceive the outside world as continuous despite the sudden disruptions created by each eye movement. To date, the mechanism that the brain employs to achieve visual continuity across eye movements remains unclear. While it has been proposed that the oculomotor system quickly updates and informs the visual system about the upcoming eye movement, behavioral studies investigating the time course of this updating suggest the involvement of a slow mechanism, estimated to take more than 500 ms to operate effectively. This is a surprisingly slow estimate, because both the visual system and the oculomotor system process information faster. If spatiotopic updating is indeed this slow, it cannot contribute to perceptual continuity, because it is outside the temporal regime of typical oculomotor behavior. Here, we argue that the behavioral paradigms that have been used previously are suboptimal to measure the speed of spatiotopic updating. In this study, we used a fast gaze-contingent paradigm, using high phi as a continuous stimulus across eye movements. We observed fast spatiotopic updating within 150 ms after stimulus onset. The results suggest the involvement of a fast updating mechanism that predictively influences visual perception after an eye movement. The temporal characteristics of this mechanism are compatible with the rate at which saccadic eye movements are typically observed in natural viewing.


2016 ◽  
Vol 116 (3) ◽  
pp. 1250-1260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Isaac Meso ◽  
Anna Montagnini ◽  
Jason Bell ◽  
Guillaume S. Masson

Humans are highly sensitive to symmetry. During scene exploration, the area of the retina with dense light receptor coverage acquires most information from relevant locations determined by gaze fixation. We characterized patterns of fixational eye movements made by observers staring at synthetic scenes either freely (i.e., free exploration) or during a symmetry orientation discrimination task (i.e., active exploration). Stimuli could be mirror-symmetric or not. Both free and active exploration generated more saccades parallel to the axis of symmetry than along other orientations. Most saccades were small (<2°), leaving the fovea within a 4° radius of fixation. Analysis of saccade dynamics showed that the observed parallel orientation selectivity emerged within 500 ms of stimulus onset and persisted throughout the trials under both viewing conditions. Symmetry strongly distorted existing anisotropies in gaze direction in a seemingly automatic process. We argue that this bias serves a functional role in which adjusted scene sampling enhances and maintains sustained sensitivity to local spatial correlations arising from symmetry.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182199851
Author(s):  
Claudia Bonmassar ◽  
Francesco Pavani ◽  
Alessio Di Renzo ◽  
Cristina Caselli ◽  
Wieske van Zoest

Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggested that early profound deaf adults were less susceptible to uninformative gaze cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow cues. The aim of the present work was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behaviour helps explain the reduced impact of the social cue in deaf adults. We tracked the gaze of 25 early profound deaf and 25 age-matched hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative central cues (gaze vs. arrow), stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 vs. 750 ms) and cue-validity (valid vs. invalid) as within-subject factors. In both groups, the cue-effect on RT was comparable for the two cues, although deaf observers responded significantly slower than hearing controls. While deaf and hearing observers eye movement pattern looked similar when the cue was presented in isolation, deaf participants made significantly eye movements than hearing controls once the discrimination target appeared. Notably, further analysis of eye movements in the deaf group revealed that independent of cue-type, cue-validity affected saccade landing position, while latency was not modulated by these factors. Saccade landing position was also strongly related to the magnitude of the validity effect on RT, such that the greater the difference in saccade landing position between invalid and valid trials, the greater the difference in manual RT between invalid and valid trials. This work suggests that the contribution of overt selection in central cueing of attention is more prominent in deaf adults and helps determine the manual performance, irrespective of cue-type.


2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Semmlow ◽  
Yung-Fu Chen ◽  
Tara L. Alvarez ◽  
Claude Pedrono

If two targets are carefully aligned so that they fall along the cyclopean axis, the required eye movement will be symmetrical with the two eyes turning equally inward or outward. When such “pure vergence stimuli” are used only a “pure vergence movement” is required, yet almost all responses include saccadic eye movements, a rapid tandem movement of the eyes. When saccades occur, they must either produce an error in the desired symmetrical response or correct an error from an asymmetrical vergence response. A series of eye movement responses to pure convergence stimuli (4.0 deg step stimuli) were measured in 12 subjects and the occurrence, timing and amplitude of saccades was measured. Early saccades (within 400 msec of the stimulus onset) appeared in 80% to 100% of the responses. In most subjects, the first saccade increased the asymmetry of the response, taking the eyes away from the midline position. In three subjects, these asymmetry-inducing saccades brought one eye, the preferred or dominant eye, close to the target, but in the other subjects these asymmetry-inducing saccades were probably due to the distraction caused by the transient diplopic image generated by a pure vergence stimulus. While many of these asymmetry-inducing saccades showed saccade-like enhancements of vergence, they were, with the exception of two subjects, primarily divergent and did not facilitate the ongoing convergence movement. All subjects had some responses where the first saccade improved response symmetry, correcting an asymmetry brought about by unequal vergence movements in the two eyes. In five subjects, large symmetry-inducing saccades corrected an asymmetrical vergence response, bringing the eyes back to the midline (to within a few tenths of a degree).


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-311
Author(s):  
José David Moreno ◽  
José A. León ◽  
Lorena A. M. Arnal ◽  
Juan Botella

Abstract. We report the results of a meta-analysis of 22 experiments comparing the eye movement data obtained from young ( Mage = 21 years) and old ( Mage = 73 years) readers. The data included six eye movement measures (mean gaze duration, mean fixation duration, total sentence reading time, mean number of fixations, mean number of regressions, and mean length of progressive saccade eye movements). Estimates were obtained of the typified mean difference, d, between the age groups in all six measures. The results showed positive combined effect size estimates in favor of the young adult group (between 0.54 and 3.66 in all measures), although the difference for the mean number of fixations was not significant. Young adults make in a systematic way, shorter gazes, fewer regressions, and shorter saccadic movements during reading than older adults, and they also read faster. The meta-analysis results confirm statistically the most common patterns observed in previous research; therefore, eye movements seem to be a useful tool to measure behavioral changes due to the aging process. Moreover, these results do not allow us to discard either of the two main hypotheses assessed for explaining the observed aging effects, namely neural degenerative problems and the adoption of compensatory strategies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Ramtin Zargari Marandi ◽  
Camilla Ann Fjelsted ◽  
Iris Hrustanovic ◽  
Rikke Dan Olesen ◽  
Parisa Gazerani

The affective dimension of pain contributes to pain perception. Cognitive load may influence pain-related feelings. Eye tracking has proven useful for detecting cognitive load effects objectively by using relevant eye movement characteristics. In this study, we investigated whether eye movement characteristics differ in response to pain-related feelings in the presence of low and high cognitive loads. A set of validated, control, and pain-related sounds were applied to provoke pain-related feelings. Twelve healthy young participants (six females) performed a cognitive task at two load levels, once with the control and once with pain-related sounds in a randomized order. During the tasks, eye movements and task performance were recorded. Afterwards, the participants were asked to fill out questionnaires on their pain perception in response to the applied cognitive loads. Our findings indicate that an increased cognitive load was associated with a decreased saccade peak velocity, saccade frequency, and fixation frequency, as well as an increased fixation duration and pupil dilation range. Among the oculometrics, pain-related feelings were reflected only in the pupillary responses to a low cognitive load. The performance and perceived cognitive load decreased and increased, respectively, with the task load level and were not influenced by the pain-related sounds. Pain-related feelings were lower when performing the task compared with when no task was being performed in an independent group of participants. This might be due to the cognitive engagement during the task. This study demonstrated that cognitive processing could moderate the feelings associated with pain perception.


2009 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 934-947 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masafumi Ohki ◽  
Hiromasa Kitazawa ◽  
Takahito Hiramatsu ◽  
Kimitake Kaga ◽  
Taiko Kitamura ◽  
...  

The anatomical connection between the frontal eye field and the cerebellar hemispheric lobule VII (H-VII) suggests a potential role of the hemisphere in voluntary eye movement control. To reveal the involvement of the hemisphere in smooth pursuit and saccade control, we made a unilateral lesion around H-VII and examined its effects in three Macaca fuscata that were trained to pursue visually a small target. To the step (3°)-ramp (5–20°/s) target motion, the monkeys usually showed an initial pursuit eye movement at a latency of 80–140 ms and a small catch-up saccade at 140–220 ms that was followed by a postsaccadic pursuit eye movement that roughly matched the ramp target velocity. After unilateral cerebellar hemispheric lesioning, the initial pursuit eye movements were impaired, and the velocities of the postsaccadic pursuit eye movements decreased. The onsets of 5° visually guided saccades to the stationary target were delayed, and their amplitudes showed a tendency of increased trial-to-trial variability but never became hypo- or hypermetric. Similar tendencies were observed in the onsets and amplitudes of catch-up saccades. The adaptation of open-loop smooth pursuit velocity, tested by a step increase in target velocity for a brief period, was impaired. These lesion effects were recognized in all directions, particularly in the ipsiversive direction. A recovery was observed at 4 wk postlesion for some of these lesion effects. These results suggest that the cerebellar hemispheric region around lobule VII is involved in the control of smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Talora L. Martin ◽  
Jordan Murray ◽  
Kiran Garg ◽  
Charles Gallagher ◽  
Aasef G. Shaikh ◽  
...  

AbstractWe evaluated the effects of strabismus repair on fixational eye movements (FEMs) and stereopsis recovery in patients with fusion maldevelopment nystagmus (FMN) and patients without nystagmus. Twenty-one patients with strabismus, twelve with FMN and nine without nystagmus, were tested before and after strabismus repair. Eye-movements were recorded during a gaze-holding task under monocular viewing conditions. Fast (fixational saccades and quick phases of nystagmus) and slow (inter-saccadic drifts and slow phases of nystagmus) FEMs and bivariate contour ellipse area (BCEA) were analyzed in the viewing and non-viewing eye. Strabismus repair improved the angle of strabismus in subjects with and without FMN, however patients without nystagmus were more likely to have improvement in stereoacuity. The fixational saccade amplitudes and intersaccadic drift velocities in both eyes decreased after strabismus repair in subjects without nystagmus. The slow phase velocities were higher in patients with FMN compared to inter-saccadic drifts in patients without nystagmus. There was no change in the BCEA after surgery in either group. In patients without nystagmus, the improvement of the binocular function (stereopsis), as well as decreased fixational saccade amplitude and intersaccadic drift velocity, could be due, at least partially, to central adaptive mechanisms rendered possible by surgical realignment of the eyes. The absence of improvement in patients with FMN post strabismus repair likely suggests the lack of such adaptive mechanisms in patients with early onset infantile strabismus. Assessment of fixation eye movement characteristics can be a useful tool to predict functional improvement post strabismus repair.


1980 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 631-636
Author(s):  
Evans Mandes

Post-exposural eye movements were studied in 32 adults and 24 7-yr.-old children. Stimuli were binary figures exposed tachistoscopically in both visual fields simultaneously. The data showed significant correlations between direction of eye movement and locus of recognition for both children and adults. No significant differences were found in frequencies of eye movements of children and adults. The data are interpreted in terms of the facilitative effects of post-exposural eye movements upon perception for both groups.


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