Author: Timothy Hodgson

The fingers, not the eyes, have it

Timothy Hodgson Conferences, General news, Impact

Next week we will be presenting our work on orienting to socio-biological cues in children at the 17th European Conference on Eye Movements in Lund, Sweden.

me and eyetrackerAt last years Lincoln Summer Scientist event we asked children to play a game in which they followed a cartoon bee jumping to the left or right with their eyes whilst distracting pictures of arrows, pointing fingers and someone else’s eyes gazing to the left or right were shown in the middle of the screen.  We tracked their eye movements with an Eyelink 1000 eye tracking system and measured how quickly they made saccades to follow the bee.

We found that the youngest children (4-5 year olds) showed a large “congruency” effect for pictures of pointing fingers such that their speed of looking was slowest when the bee jumped in the opposite direction to that in which the hand pointed. Surprisingly, although the pre-schoolers weren’t similarly affected by pictures of eyes and arrows, older fellow summer scientists showed an equally strong congruency effect for all three types of cue (hand, eye and arrows).

The results are potentially very interesting and important in respect to understanding the best ways to direct young children’s attention quickly and effectively in an educational context as well as keeping them away from harm inside or outside of the home, but they might also have more profound implications. Rather than having hard wired “social brain” systems for processing socio-biological stimuli as suggested by some theorists, instead the brain may learn to form fast connections between what we see and what we do in early childhood. It just happens that pointing fingers may be among the first cues children learn to use in this way.

busy bee

We’re looking forward to finding out what other researchers think of our results in Lund and plan to replicate the finding at this years Lincoln Summer Scientists event. The work is carried out in collaboration with Nicola Gregory (Bournemouth University Face Research Centre). The work is part supported by the WESC foundation for Childhood Visual Impairment.

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Learning stimulus-saccade mappings in Parkinsons

Timothy Hodgson General news, Parkinsons, Publications

In our most recent research paper (published this month in the journal Neuropsychologia ), we investigated how people with Parkinsons perform a computerised eye movement rule switching task, which we have used previously in patients with frontal lobe damage (see U-tube video: and Summer Scientist 2012).

Many every day tasks require us to learn to make links between what we see and where we look with our eyes. We also need to be able to switch between performing one task or another (e.g. making a cup of tea, reading the newspaper and then answering the telephone) and learn new skills such as preparing a new recipe or learning a new game or sport.

Unlike patients with frontal lobe strokes, People with Parkinsons didn’t show any big problems in switching between stimulus-saccade “rules” (e.g. blue stimulus = look left), but were slower to learn a new rule by trial and error learning compared to participants without Parkinson. This suggests that the brain circuits and chemicals affected in Parkinsons play a role in this ability and that people with Parkinsons may have problems learning new visuo-spatial tasks over and above the obvious difficulties the condition causes with movement.

Parkinson's disease

Please contact me if you would like a reprint of the paper or would like to know more about this research.


 

 

 

 

Inaugural Lecture: Tuesday 9th April 6pm

Timothy Hodgson Impact

Next Tuesday I will be giving my public inaugural lecture at the University of Lincoln. I have chosen to focus on ways in which human saccadic eye movements have and may in the future have an impact beyond academia. I will explain how eye movements can change the world in 4 different ways:

1. Eye movements themselves change our perception of the world. In a sense we all see the world differently in a way affected by our individual eye movements;

2. Visual search training, improving the efficiency with which we use eye movements, can be used to improve functional vision in adults and children with visual problems;

3. Research into attention and eye movements might be brought to bear to improve navigational cues in our visual environment, such as road signage;

4. Finally and perhaps most exciting is that saccadic measures might not only be valuable in the assessment of patients with neurological disorders, but could potentially be used to provide an early diagnosis of such conditions as Parkinsons and Dementia.

eye

   I am looking forward to talking to a general audience including members of the public, colleagues, friends and family and hope they will agree that eye movements can indeed change the world!

More details of the lecture and how to book are given here:

http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/event,name,20188,en.html

GPSAC Research Project Launch Event – 9th April

Timothy Hodgson Uncategorized

The General Practice Saccade Assessment Cohort research project (GPSAC) will examine whether a quick, portable and easy to use test of eye movements (saccades) could be used as an all-in-one neurological health check for patients in primary care, capable of detecting early signs of dementia and other brain disorders.  In order to develop the project further it would be useful to get input from local GPs, practice nurses and members of the public on the project idea, design and practical issues facing patients and professionals. 

MRI-scan-of-human-brain-008

With this aim a launch workshop event has been scheduled for spring 2013 which will include a practical demonstration of the saccadometer device, project presentation, lunch and focus group discussions. Travel and other expenses for attendees will be reimbursed.

Date & Time: Tuesday 9th April 2013 11am-2.30 pm

Location: Lincoln Think Tank, Ruston Way, LN6 7FL 

Please contact  me (Tim Hodgson), University of Lincoln to register: email: tlhodgson@lincoln.ac.uk 01522 886159

 

British Oculomotor Group Meeting – Kingston

Timothy Hodgson Conferences

This week I will be presenting my research on how damage to the prefrontal cortex affects eye movements at the 24th British Oculomotor Group Meeting (BOMG) hosted by the Eye Movements and Cognition Lab at Kingston University.
bomg

Whilst at Cambridge University  on Sabbatical in 2009 I was privileged to work with a group of patients with very localised damage affecting the very front of the brain. In most cases this was due to unavoidable collateral damage occurring when a brain tumour had been surgical removed. People with this type of brain injury are often remarkably unaffected by their injury and it can often be quite hard for a psychologist to find tasks that they can’t do perfectly well! But my research found that they made significantly more mistakes when required to switch between rules linking 3 different coloured cues with eye movements towards 3 possible locations (e.g. blue=up, red=left and yellow=right). These videos from my You Tube Eye Movements site show example trials from the task (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY6SY5whZAU).

MRI scan image

 

 

 

 

One outstanding question following on from this research is whether this impairment in an artificial computer based task in the psychology lab might have implications for what things people with this type of brain injury can or can’t do in the real world. We often have to make arbitrary connections between what we see and where we look during every day tasks and these patients may find this particularly difficult.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you are interested in this research for whatever reason and I can tell you more about it.

See also: Research explores rule switching across the life span