Altered Gaze Control During Emotional Face Exploration in Patients With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Neurology

From the Department of Neurology (F.N., K.B., I.U., A.C.L., D.L.), University of Ulm; German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) (A.C.L.), Ulm; and Institute of Medical Technology (M.G.), Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany.

Published: August 2023

AI Article Synopsis

  • Cognitively unimpaired ALS patients struggle to process emotional facial expressions, showing abnormal eye movement patterns during visual exploration compared to healthy controls.
  • The study found that these patients fixated longer on irrelevant face areas when viewing expressions of fear and disgust, suggesting issues with attention control rather than distinct cognitive decline.
  • These altered gaze patterns may lead to difficulties in recognizing emotions, pointing to a unique dysfunction in ALS related to emotional processing, possibly involving frontotemporal brain areas.

Article Abstract

Objectives: Up to 50% of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) present with cognitive problems and behavioral dysfunctions including recognition of human faces presenting different emotions. We investigated whether impaired processing of emotional faces is associated with abnormal scan paths during visual exploration.

Methods: Cognitively unimpaired patients with ALS (n = 45) and matched healthy controls (n = 37) underwent neuropsychological assessment and video-based eye tracking. Eye movements were recorded while participants visually explored faces expressing different emotions (neutral, disgusted, happy, fearful, and sad) and houses mimicking faces.

Results: Compared with controls, patients with ALS fixated significantly longer to regions which are not relevant for emotional information when faces expressed fear ( = 0.007) and disgust ( = 0.006), whereas the eyes received less attention in faces expressing disgust ( = 0.041). Fixation duration in any area of interest was not significantly associated with the cognitive state or clinical symptoms of disease severity.

Discussion: In cognitively unimpaired patients with ALS, altered gaze patterns while visually exploring faces expressing different emotions might derive from impaired top-down attentional control with possible involvement of subliminal frontotemporal areas. This may account for indistinctness in emotion recognition reported in previous studies because nonsalient features retrieve more attention compared with salient areas. Current findings may indicate distinct emotion processing dysfunction of ALS pathology, which may be different from, for example, executive dysfunction.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10424840PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000207214DOI Listing

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