Attentional Selection Accompanied by Eye Vergence as Revealed by Event-Related Brain Potentials.

Neural mechanisms of attention allow selective sensory information processing. Top-down deployment of visual-spatial attention is conveyed by cortical feedback connections from frontal regions to lower sensory areas modulating late stimulus responses. A recent study reported the occurrence of small eye vergence during orienting top-down attention. Here we assessed a possible link between vergence and attention by comparing visual event related potentials (vERPs) to a cue stimulus that induced attention to shift towards the target location to the vERPs to a no-cue stimulus that did not trigger orienting attention. The results replicate the findings of eye vergence responses during orienting attention and show that the strength and time of eye vergence coincide with the onset and strength of the vERPs when subjects oriented attention. Our findings therefore support the idea that eye vergence relates to and possibly has a role in attentional selection.

Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation - Outcome Measure.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to assess the reliability and validity of the Spanish translation of the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation - Outcome Measure, a 34-item self-report questionnaire that measures the client's status in the domains of Subjective well-being, Problems/Symptoms, Life functioning, and Risk. METHOD: Six hundred and forty-four adult participants were included in two samples: the clinical sample (n=192) from different mental health and primary care centers; and the nonclinical sample (n=452), which included a student and a community sample. RESULTS: The questionnaire showed good acceptability and internal consistency, appropriate test-retest reliability, and acceptable convergent validity. Strong differentiation between clinical and nonclinical samples was found. As expected, the Risk domain had different characteristics than other domains, but all findings were comparable with the UK referential data. Cutoff scores were calculated for clinical significant change assessment. CONCLUSION: The Spanish version of the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation - Outcome Measure showed acceptable psychometric properties, providing support for using the questionnaire for monitoring the progress of Spanish-speaking psychotherapy clients.