Evidence of elevated situational awareness for active duty soldiers during navigation of a virtual environment.

U.S. service members maintain constant situational awareness (SA) due to training and experience operating in dynamic and complex environments. Work examining how military experience impacts SA during visual search of a complex naturalistic environment, is limited. Here, we compare Active Duty service members and Civilians' physiological behavior during a navigational visual search task in an open-world virtual environment (VE) while cognitive load was manipulated. We measured eye-tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG) outcomes from Active Duty (N = 21) and Civilians (N = 15) while they navigated a desktop VE at a self-regulated pace. Participants searched and counted targets (N = 15) presented among distractors, while cognitive load was manipulated with an auditory Math Task. Results showed Active Duty participants reported significantly greater/closer to the correct number of targets compared to Civilians. Overall, Active Duty participants scanned the VE with faster peak saccade velocities and greater average saccade magnitudes compared to Civilians. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) response (EEG P-300) was significantly weighted more to initial fixations for the Active Duty group, showing reduced attentional resources on object refixations compared to Civilians. There were no group differences in fixation outcomes or overall CNN response when comparing targets versus distractor objects. When cognitive load was manipulated, only Civilians significantly decreased their average dwell time on each object and the Active Duty group had significantly fewer numbers of correct answers on the Math Task. Overall, the Active Duty group explored the VE with increased scanning speed and distance and reduced cognitive re-processing on objects, employing a different, perhaps expert, visual search strategy indicative of increased SA. The Active Duty group maintained SA in the main visual search task and did not appear to shift focus to the secondary Math Task. Future work could compare how a stress inducing environment impacts these groups' physiological or cognitive markers and performance for these groups.

Jointly looking to the past and the future in visual working memory.

Working memory enables us to bridge past sensory information to upcoming future behaviour. Accordingly, by its very nature, working memory is concerned with two components: the past and the future. Yet, in conventional laboratory tasks, these two components are often conflated, such as when sensory information in working memory is encoded and tested at the same location. We developed a task in which we dissociated the past (encoded location) and future (to-be-tested location) attributes of visual contents in working memory. This enabled us to independently track the utilisation of past and future memory attributes through gaze, as observed during mnemonic selection. Our results reveal the joint consideration of past and future locations. This was prevalent even at the single-trial level of individual saccades that were jointly biased to the past and future. This uncovers the rich nature of working memory representations, whereby both past and future memory attributes are retained and can be accessed together when memory contents become relevant for behaviour.

Clinical value of video oculomotor evaluation in the differential diagnosis of multiple system atrophy and Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND: Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a neurodegenerative disease that progresses rapidly and has a poor prognosis. This study aimed to assess the value of video oculomotor evaluation (VOE) in the differential diagnosis of MSA and Parkinson's disease (PD). METHODS: In total, 28 patients with MSA, 31 patients with PD, and 30 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HC) were screened and included in this study. The evaluation consisted of a gaze-holding test, smooth pursuit eye movement (SPEM), random saccade, and optokinetic nystagmus (OKN). RESULTS: The MSA and PD groups had more abnormalities and decreased SPEM gain than the HC group (64.29%, 35.48%, 10%, p < .001). The SPEM gain in the MSA group was significantly lower than that in the PD group at specific frequencies. Patients with MSA and PD showed prolonged latencies in all saccade directions compared with those with HC. However, the two diseases had no significant differences in the saccade parameters. The OKN gain gradually decreased from the HC to the PD and the MSA groups (p < .05). Compared with the PD group, the gain in the MSA group was further decreased in the OKN test at 30°/s (Left, p = .010; Right p = .016). Receiver operating characteristic curves showed that the combination of oculomotor parameters with age and course of disease could aid in the differential diagnosis of patients with MSA and PD, with a sensitivity of 89.29% and a specificity of 70.97%. CONCLUSIONS: The combination of oculomotor parameters and clinical data may aid in the differential diagnosis of MSA and PD. Furthermore, VOE is vital in the identification of neurodegenerative diseases.

Infants' reorienting efficiency depends on parental autistic traits and predicts future socio-communicative behaviors.

Attentional reorienting is dysfunctional not only in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but also in infants who will develop ASD, thus constituting a potential causal factor of future social interaction and communication abilities. Following the research domain criteria framework, we hypothesized that the presence of subclinical autistic traits in parents should lead to atypical infants' attentional reorienting, which in turn should impact on their future socio-communication behavior in toddlerhood. During an attentional cueing task, we measured the saccadic latencies in a large sample (total enrolled n = 89; final sample n = 71) of 8-month-old infants from the general population as a proxy for their stimulus-driven attention. Infants were grouped in a high parental traits (HPT; n = 23) or in a low parental traits (LPT; n = 48) group, according to the degree of autistic traits self-reported by their parents. Infants (n = 33) were then longitudinally followed to test their socio-communicative behaviors at 21 months. Results show a sluggish reorienting system, which was a longitudinal predictor of future socio-communicative skills at 21 months. Our combined transgenerational and longitudinal findings suggest that the early functionality of the stimulus-driven attentional network-redirecting attention from one event to another-could be directly connected to future social and communication development.

Peripheral vision and crowding in mental maze-solving.

Solving a maze effectively relies on both perception and cognition. Studying maze-solving behavior contributes to our knowledge about these important processes. Through psychophysical experiments and modeling simulations, we examine the role of peripheral vision, specifically visual crowding in the periphery, in mental maze-solving. Experiment 1 measured gaze patterns while varying maze complexity, revealing a direct relationship between visual complexity and maze-solving efficiency. Simulations of the maze-solving task using a peripheral vision model confirmed the observed crowding effects while making an intriguing prediction that saccades provide a conservative measure of how far ahead observers can perceive the path. Experiment 2 confirms that observers can judge whether a point lies on the path at considerably greater distances than their average saccade. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that peripheral vision plays a key role in mental maze-solving.

Bidirectional brain-body interactions during natural story listening.

Narratives can synchronize neural and physiological signals between individuals, but the relationship between these signals, and the underlying mechanism, is unclear. We hypothesized a top-down effect of cognition on arousal and predicted that auditory narratives will drive not only brain signals but also peripheral physiological signals. We find that auditory narratives entrained gaze variation, saccade initiation, pupil size, and heart rate. This is consistent with a top-down effect of cognition on autonomic function. We also hypothesized a bottom-up effect, whereby autonomic physiology affects arousal. Controlled breathing affected pupil size, and heart rate was entrained by controlled saccades. Additionally, fluctuations in heart rate preceded fluctuations of pupil size and brain signals. Gaze variation, pupil size, and heart rate were all associated with anterior-central brain signals. Together, these results suggest bidirectional causal effects between peripheral autonomic function and central brain circuits involved in the control of arousal.

Common structure of saccades and microsaccades in visual perception.

We obtain large amounts of external information through our eyes, a process often considered analogous to picture mapping onto a camera lens. However, our eyes are never as still as a camera lens, with saccades occurring between fixations and microsaccades occurring within a fixation. Although saccades are agreed to be functional for information sampling in visual perception, it remains unknown if microsaccades have a similar function when eye movement is restricted. Here, we demonstrated that saccades and microsaccades share common spatiotemporal structures in viewing visual objects. Twenty-seven adults viewed faces and houses in free-viewing and fixation-controlled conditions. Both saccades and microsaccades showed distinctive spatiotemporal patterns between face and house viewing that could be discriminated by pattern classifications. The classifications based on saccades and microsaccades could also be mutually generalized. Importantly, individuals who showed more distinctive saccadic patterns between faces and houses also showed more distinctive microsaccadic patterns. Moreover, saccades and microsaccades showed a higher structure similarity for face viewing than house viewing and a common orienting preference for the eye region over the mouth region. These findings suggested a common oculomotor program that is used to optimize information sampling during visual object perception.

Pre- and post-operative semicircular canal function evaluated by video head impulse test in patients with vestibular schwannoma.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate pre- and post-operative semicircular canal function in patients with vestibular schwannoma (VS) by the video Head Impulse Test (vHIT). METHODS: Nineteen patients with VS who underwent surgery were enrolled in this study. The gain in vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and the degree of scatter in catch-up saccades were examined pre- and post-operatively for the semicircular canals in VS patients. RESULTS: Ten of 19 cases (52.6 %) with VS were defined as demonstrating both superior vestibular nerve (SVN) and inferior vestibular nerve (IVN) impairment from the results of pre-operative vHIT. Hearing level and subjective vestibular symptoms showed significant correlations with pre-operative semicircular canal function. Compared to pre-operative vHIT results, VOR gains within 1 month after surgery were significantly reduced in all three canals; however, significant differences had disappeared in the anterior and posterior semicircular canals at 6 months after surgery. Cases of unknown origin had a significantly greater reduction in posterior semicircular canal function after surgery compared with those with disease of IVN origin. CONCLUSIONS: As vHIT could evaluate pre-operative vestibular nerve impairment, post-operative VOR gain reduction and the degree of vestibular compensation, semicircular canal function evaluated by vHIT provides a good deal of useful information regarding VS patients undergoing surgery compared to caloric testing, and vHIT should be performed pre- and post-operatively for patients with VS.

Impacts of education level on Montreal Cognitive Assessment and saccades in community residents from Western China.

OBJECTIVES: This cross-sectional study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and saccade in discerning the cognitive function levels among community populations characterized by diverse educational backgrounds. METHODS: Data from 665 Western China individuals encompassed MoCA scores and saccade performance. The study examined how education level and age influenced these assessments and highlighted the contrasting abilities of these measures in detecting cognitive abnormalities. RESULTS: The saccade model revealed a consistent cognitive impairment prevalence (15.5%) compared to previous clinical data (9.7% to 23.3%), while MoCA exhibited variable rates (25.1% to 52.8%). Notably, saccades and MoCA significantly diverged in detecting cognitive dysfunction. Additionally, education level had a greater impact on MoCA (effect size: 0.272) compared to saccades (0.024) affecting all MoCA sub-items, with age exerting a smaller influence on MoCA (0.037) compared to saccades (0.056). CONCLUSION: Saccades are less susceptible to the influence of education level when compared to MoCA, making saccade a potentially more suitable cognitive screening tool for rural community populations. SIGNIFICANCE: This study represents a pioneering approach by employing saccade detection within community populations to distinguish cognitive function status.

Repetition blindness in a saccadic persistence of vision display.

A form of repetition blindness in visually unimpaired individuals was found for objects presented during saccades. Observers were asked to draw their percepts after making saccades across an LED strip that "painted" an image on their retinas by presenting sequential columns of a bitmap at a speed to match a 30-degree saccade. During experimental trials, repetitions of a single letter (either "A," "X," "H," or "V") were presented across saccades. Although an average of six letters were presented across each saccade, observers typically indicated perceiving only a single instance of the letter in their drawings. This inability to perceive multiple instances of a letter was not due to a limited region of attentional processing, as it only attained for multiple instances along the axis of the saccade-horizontal saccades did not affect perception of multiple letters along the vertical axis. This effect is likely due to selective suppression of visual areas during saccades.

The impact of acute asymmetric hearing loss on multisensory integration.

Humans have the remarkable ability to integrate information from different senses, which greatly facilitates the detection, localization and identification of events in the environment. About 466 million people worldwide suffer from hearing loss. Yet, the impact of hearing loss on how the senses work together is rarely investigated. Here, we investigate how a common sensory impairment, asymmetric conductive hearing loss (AHL), alters the way our senses interact by examining human orienting behaviour with normal hearing (NH) and acute AHL. This type of hearing loss disrupts auditory localization. We hypothesized that this creates a conflict between auditory and visual spatial estimates and alters how auditory and visual inputs are integrated to facilitate multisensory spatial perception. We analysed the spatial and temporal properties of saccades to auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli before and after plugging the right ear of participants. Both spatial and temporal aspects of multisensory integration were affected by AHL. Compared with NH, AHL caused participants to make slow, inaccurate and unprecise saccades towards auditory targets. Surprisingly, increased weight on visual input resulted in accurate audiovisual localization with AHL. This came at a cost: saccade latencies for audiovisual targets increased significantly. The larger the auditory localization errors, the less participants were able to benefit from audiovisual integration in terms of saccade latency. Our results indicate that observers immediately change sensory weights to effectively deal with acute AHL and preserve audiovisual accuracy in a way that cannot be fully explained by statistical models of optimal cue integration.

Temporal dynamics of autonomic nervous system responses under cognitive-emotional workload in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is commonly observed in various mental disorders, particularly when individuals engage in prolonged cognitive-emotional tasks that require ANS adjustment to workload. Although the understanding of the temporal dynamics of sympathetic and parasympathetic tones in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is limited, analyzing ANS reactions to cognitive-emotional workload could provide valuable insights into one of the underlying causes of OCD. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of heart rate (HR) and pupil area (PA) while participants with OCD and healthy volunteers solved antisaccade tasks, with affective pictures serving as central fixation stimuli. The data of 31 individuals with OCD and 30 healthy volunteers were included in the study, comprising three separate blocks, each lasting approximately 8 min. The results revealed an increase in sympathetic tone in the OCD group, with the most noticeable rise occurring during the middle part of each block, particularly during the presentation of negative stimuli. Healthy volunteers demonstrated adaptive temporal dynamics of HR and PA from the first block to the last block of tasks, whereas individuals with OCD exhibited fewer changes over time, suggesting a reduced adaptation of the ANS sympathetic tone to cognitive-emotional workload in OCD.

Abnormal Oculomotor Corollary Discharge Signaling as a Trans-diagnostic Mechanism of Psychosis.

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Corollary discharge (CD) signals are "copies" of motor signals sent to sensory areas to predict the corresponding input. They are a posited mechanism enabling one to distinguish actions generated by oneself vs external forces. Consequently, altered CD is a hypothesized mechanism for agency disturbances in psychosis. Previous studies have shown a decreased influence of CD signals on visual perception in individuals with schizophrenia-particularly in those with more severe positive symptoms. We therefore hypothesized that altered CD may be a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis. STUDY DESIGN: We examined oculomotor CD (using the blanking task) in 49 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (SZ), 36 bipolar participants with psychosis (BPP), and 40 healthy controls (HC). Participants made a saccade to a visual target. Upon saccade initiation, the target disappeared and reappeared at a horizontally displaced position. Participants indicated the direction of displacement. With intact CD, participants can make accurate perceptual judgements. Otherwise, participants may use saccade landing site as a proxy of pre-saccadic target to inform perception. Thus, multi-level modeling was used to examine the influence of target displacement and saccade landing site on displacement judgements. STUDY RESULTS: SZ and BPP were equally less sensitive to target displacement than HC. Moreover, regardless of diagnosis, SZ and BPP with more severe positive symptoms were more likely to rely on saccade landing site. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that altered CD may be a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis.

Effect of Repetitive Head Impacts on Saccade Performance in Canadian University Football Players.

OBJECTIVE: Investigate the effect of cumulative head impacts on saccade latency and errors, measured across two successive football seasons. DESIGN: Participants were acquired from a sample of convenience-one Canadian university football team. Head impacts were collected during training camp, practices, eight regular season games, and four playoff games in each season. Saccade measurements were collected at five time points-before and after training camp, at midseason, after regular season, and after playoffs. SETTING: Two seasons following players from a single USports football team during practices and games. PARTICIPANTS: Players who completed a baseline saccade measurement and a minimum of one follow-up measurement were included in the study. A total of 127 players were monitored across two competitive seasons, including 61 players who participated in both seasons. INDEPENDENT VARIABLES: Head impact measurements were collected using helmet-mounted sensors. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Saccade latency and number of errors were measured using high-speed video or electro-oculography. RESULTS: On average, each head impact increased prosaccade latency by 5.16 × 10 -3 ms (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.26 × 10 -4 -1.00 × 10 -2 , P = 0.03) and antisaccade latency by 5.74 × 10 -3 ms (95% CI, 7.18 × 10 -4 -1.06 × 10 -2 , P = 0.02). These latency increases did not decrease between the two seasons; in fact, prosaccade latencies were 23.20 ms longer (95% CI, 19.40-27.14, P < 0.001) at the second season's baseline measurement than the first. The number of saccade errors was not affected by cumulative head impacts. CONCLUSIONS: Repetitive head impacts in Canadian university football result in cumulative declines in brain function as measured by saccade performance. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Football organizations should consider implementing policies focused on reducing head impacts to improve player safety.

Visuomotor coordination and cognitive capacity in blindsight.

Classical literature on blindsight described that some patients with lesions to the primary visual cortex could respond to visual stimuli without subjective awareness. Recent studies addressed more complex arguments on the conscious state of blindsight subjects such as existence of partial awareness, namely "feeling of something happening" in the lesion-affected visual field, termed 'type II blindsight', and high-level performance in complex cognitive tasks in blindsight model monkeys. Endeavors to clarify the visual pathways for blindsight revealed the parallel thalamic routes mediating the visual inputs from the superior colliculus to extrastriate and frontoparietal cortices, which may underlie the flexible visuomotor association and cognitive control in the blindsight subjects. Furthermore, involvement of post-lesion plasticity is suggested for these neural systems to operate.

The effect of impaired velocity signals on goal-directed eye and hand movements.

Information about position and velocity is essential to predict where moving targets will be in the future, and to accurately move towards them. But how are the two signals combined over time to complete goal-directed movements? We show that when velocity information is impaired due to using second-order motion stimuli, saccades directed towards moving targets land at positions where targets were ~ 100 ms before saccade initiation, but hand movements are accurate. Importantly, the longer latencies of hand movements allow for additional time to process the sensory information available. When increasing the period of time one sees the moving target before making the saccade, saccades become accurate. In line with that, hand movements with short latencies show higher curvature, indicating corrections based on an update of incoming sensory information. These results suggest that movements are controlled by an independent and evolving combination of sensory information about the target's position and velocity.

Inhibition functions can be improved in children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-tracking study.

Cognitive remediation therapy interventions could improve cognitive functioning in subjects with autism. To investigate the benefit of a short cognitive training rehabilitation in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on pursuit and fixation performances. We recruited two groups (G1 and G2) of 30 children with ASD, sex-, IQ- and age-matched (mean 11.6 ± 0.5 years), and pursuit and fixation eye movements were recorded twice at T1 and T2. Between T1 and T2, a 10-min cognitive training was performed by the G1 group only, whereas the G2 group had a 10-min of rest. For all children with ASD enrolled in the study, there was a positive correlation between restricted and repetitive behaviour scores of both Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and the number of saccades recorded during the fixation task at T1. At T1, oculomotor performances were similar for both groups of ASD children (G1 and G2). At T2, we observed a significant reduction in the number of saccades made during both pursuit and fixation tasks. Our findings underlined the importance to promote cognitive training rehabilitation for children with ASD, leading to a better performance in inhibitory and attention functioning responsible for pursuit and fixation eye movement's performance.

Microsaccades as a long-term oculomotor correlate in visual perceptual learning.

Human perceptual learning, experience-induced gains in sensory discrimination, typically yields long-term performance improvements. Recent research revealed long-lasting transfer at the untrained location enabled by feature-based attention (FBA), reminiscent of its global effect (Hung & Carrasco, Scientific Reports, 11(1), 13914, (2021)). Visual Perceptual Learning (VPL) is typically studied while observers maintain fixation, but the role of fixational eye movements is unknown. Microsaccades - the largest of fixational eye movements - provide a continuous, online, physiological measure from the oculomotor system that reveals dynamic processing, which is unavailable from behavioral measures alone. We investigated whether and how microsaccades change after training in an orientation discrimination task. For human observers trained with or without FBA, microsaccade rates were significantly reduced during the response window in both trained and untrained locations and orientations. Critically, consistent with long-term training benefits, this microsaccade-rate reduction persisted over a year. Furthermore, microsaccades were biased toward the target location prior to stimulus onset and were more suppressed for incorrect than correct trials after observers' responses. These findings reveal that fixational eye movements and VPL are tightly coupled and that learning-induced microsaccade changes are long lasting. Thus, microsaccades reflect functional dynamics of the oculomotor system during information encoding, maintenance and readout, and may serve as a reliable long-term physiological correlate in VPL.

Muscles that move the retina augment compound eye vision in Drosophila.

Most animals have compound eyes, with tens to thousands of lenses attached rigidly to the exoskeleton. A natural assumption is that all of these species must resort to moving either their head or their body to actively change their visual input. However, classic anatomy has revealed that flies have muscles poised to move their retinas under the stable lenses of each compound eye1-3. Here we show that Drosophila use their retinal muscles to smoothly track visual motion, which helps to stabilize the retinal image, and also to perform small saccades when viewing a stationary scene. We show that when the retina moves, visual receptive fields shift accordingly, and that even the smallest retinal saccades activate visual neurons. Using a head-fixed behavioural paradigm, we find that Drosophila perform binocular, vergence movements of their retinas-which could enhance depth perception-when crossing gaps, and impairing the physiology of retinal motor neurons alters gap-crossing trajectories during free behaviour. That flies evolved an ability to actuate their retinas suggests that moving the eye independently of the head is broadly paramount for animals. The similarities of smooth and saccadic movements of the Drosophila retina and the vertebrate eye highlight a notable example of convergent evolution.