Slowed Prosaccades and Increased Antisaccade Errors As a Potential Behavioral Biomarker of Multiple System Atrophy.

Current clinical diagnostic tools are limited in their ability to accurately differentiate idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) from multiple system atrophy (MSA) and other parkinsonian disorders early in the disease course, but eye movements may stand as objective and sensitive markers of disease differentiation and progression. To assess the use of eye movement performance for uniquely characterizing PD and MSA, subjects diagnosed with PD ( = 21), MSA ( = 11), and age-matched controls (C,  = 20) were tested on the prosaccade and antisaccade tasks using an infrared eye tracker. Twenty of these subjects were retested ~7 months later.

Sensorimotor and executive function slowing in anesthesiology residents after overnight shifts.

Study Objective: Medical residents working overnight call shifts experience sleep deprivation and circadian clock disruption. This leads to deficits in sensorimotor function and increases in workplace accidents. Using quick tablet-based tasks, we investigate whether measureable executive function differences exist following a single overnight call versus routine shift, and whether factors like stress, rest and caffeine affect these measures.

Impaired Cognitive Performance in Youth Athletes Exposed to Repetitive Head Impacts.

Worldwide, more than 22 million children and adolescents are exposed to repetitive head impacts (RHI) in soccer. Evidence indicates cumulative effects on brain structure, but it is not known whether exposure to RHI affects cognitive improvement in adolescents. The aim of the study was to determine whether exposure to RHI while heading the ball in soccer affects improvement in cognitive performance in adolescents over time.

Optimal multisensory decision-making in a reaction-time task.

Humans and animals can integrate sensory evidence from various sources to make decisions in a statistically near-optimal manner, provided that the stimulus presentation time is fixed across trials. Little is known about whether optimality is preserved when subjects can choose when to make a decision (reaction-time task), nor when sensory inputs have time-varying reliability. Using a reaction-time version of a visual/vestibular heading discrimination task, we show that behavior is clearly sub-optimal when quantified with traditional optimality metrics that ignore reaction times.

Reaching the limit of the oculomotor plant: 3D kinematics after abducens nerve stimulation during the torsional vestibulo-ocular reflex.

Accumulating evidence shows that the oculomotor plant is capable of implementing aspects of three-dimensional kinematics such as Listing's law and the half-angle rule. But these studies have only examined the eye under static conditions or with movements that normally obey these rules (e.g.