Portable eyetracking-based assessment of memory decline.

Introduction: Preferential viewing of novel stimuli in the Visual Paired Comparison task has provided a useful marker of memory and medial temporal lobe function. We created a portable version of the VPC (P-VPC) and contrasted P-VPC metrics against the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in healthy adults, to assess the validity and reliability of the P-VPC as an indicator of memory function across age. A supplementary case series was conducted with individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias, to provide a preliminary illustration of the P-VPC's use as a measure in clinical populations.

Eye Movement Reinstatement and Neural Reactivation During Mental Imagery.

Half a century ago, Donald Hebb posited that mental imagery is a constructive process that emulates perception. Specifically, Hebb claimed that visual imagery results from the reactivation of neural activity associated with viewing images. He also argued that neural reactivation and imagery benefit from the re-enactment of eye movement patterns that first occurred at viewing (fixation reinstatement).

Anterolateral Entorhinal Cortex Volume Predicted by Altered Intra-Item Configural Processing.

Recent functional imaging studies have proposed that the human entorhinal cortex (ERC) is subdivided into functionally distinct anterolateral (alERC) and posteromedial (pmERC) subregions. The alERC overlaps with regions that are affected earliest by Alzheimer's disease pathology, yet its cognitive function remains poorly understood. Previous human fMRI studies have focused on its role in object memory, but rodent studies on the putatively homologous lateral entorhinal cortex suggest that it also plays an important role in representing spatial properties of objects.

Perceptual salience does not influence emotional arousal's impairing effects on top-down attention.

Emotional arousal impairs top-down attentional control while strengthening bottom-up attentional biases. In this study, we examined whether top-down impairments due to arousal can be modulated by increasing the perceptual salience of the target stimulus. To examine this question, we briefly displayed positive and negative arousing images prior to the encoding of 2 emotionally neutral items, 1 of which was to be remembered and 1 of which was perceptually salient (the to-be-remembered and the salient items were either the same item or different items).

Age-related changes to oscillatory dynamics in hippocampal and neocortical networks.

Recent models of hippocampal function have emphasized its role in relational binding - the ability to form lasting representations regarding the relations among distinct elements or items which can support memory performance, even over brief delays (e.g., several seconds).

Association with emotional information alters subsequent processing of neutral faces.

The processing of emotional as compared to neutral information is associated with different patterns in eye movement and neural activity. However, the 'emotionality' of a stimulus can be conveyed not only by its physical properties, but also by the information that is presented with it. There is very limited work examining the how emotional information may influence the immediate perceptual processing of otherwise neutral information.

The role of overt attention in emotion-modulated memory.

The presence of emotional stimuli results in a central/peripheral tradeoff effect in memory: memory for central details is enhanced at the cost of peripheral items. It has been assumed that emotion-modulated differences in memory are the result of differences in attention, but this has not been tested directly. The present experiment used eye movement monitoring as an index of overt attention allocation and mediation analysis to determine whether differences in attention were related to subsequent memory.

Eye movement monitoring of memory.

Explicit (often verbal) reports are typically used to investigate memory (e.g. "Tell me what you remember about the person you saw at the bank yesterday.

Eye movement monitoring reveals differential influences of emotion on memory.

Research shows that memory for emotional aspects of an event may be enhanced at the cost of impaired memory for surrounding peripheral details. However, this has only been assessed directly via verbal reports which reveal the outcome of a long stream of processing but cannot shed light on how/when emotion may affect the retrieval process. In the present experiment, eye movement monitoring (EMM) was used as an indirect measure of memory as it can reveal aspects of online memory processing.