According to the ideomotor principle, action preparation involves the activation of associations between actions and their effects. However, there is only sparse research on the role of action effects in saccade control. Here, participants responded to lateralized auditory stimuli with spatially compatible saccades toward peripheral targets (e.g., a rhombus in ...

In the saccadic literature, the voluntary control of eye movement involves inhibiting automatic saccadic plans. In contrast, the dominant view in reading is that linguistic processes trigger saccade planning. The present study explores the possibility of a common control mechanism, in which cognitively driven responses compete to inhibit automatic, perceptually ...

Gamma range EEG has been associated with cognition. Bodis-Wollner et al. [Ann NY Acad Sci 2002;956:464-7] and Forgacs et al. [Perception 2008;37:419-32] described posterior perisaccadic gamma (35-45 Hz) modulation associated with voluntary saccades. Voluntary impairment is a hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD). We have done correlational analysis of frontally and ...

Covert attention modulates saccadic performance, e.g. the abrupt onset of a task-irrelevant visual stimulus grabs attention as measured by a decrease in saccadic reaction time (SRT). The attentional advantage bestowed by the task-irrelevant stimulus is short lived: SRT is actually longer about 200 ms after the onset of a stimulus ...

Error processing is associated with distinct event-related potential components (ERPs), i.e. the error-related negativity (ERN) which occurs within approximately 150ms and is typically more pronounced than the correct-response negativity (CRN), and the error positivity (Pe) emerging from about 200 to 400ms after an erroneous response. The short latency of the ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Children are able to inhibit a prepotent reaction to suddenly arising visual stimuli, although this skill is not yet as pronounced as it is in adulthood. However, up to now the inhibition mechanism to acoustic stimuli has been scarcely investigated METHODS: Reflexive (prosaccade) and inhibitory (antisaccade) responses to ...

Whether a link exists between the two orienting processes of saccade preparation and visuospatial attention has typically been studied by using either sensory cues or pre-determined rules that instruct subjects where to allocate these limited resources. In the real world, explicit instructions are not always available and presumably expectations shaped ...

The current study investigated the role of the frontal eye fields (FEF) in the suppression of an unwanted eye movement ('oculomotor inhibition'). Oculomotor inhibition has generally been investigated using the antisaccade task, in which an eye movement to a task-relevant onset must be inhibited. Various lines of research have suggested ...

Previous research demonstrates that our apparent mental flexibility depends largely upon the strength of our prior intention; changing our intention in advance enables a smooth transition from one task to another (e.g. Astle et al. 2008a; Duncan et al. 2006; Husain et al. 2003). However, these necessarily rapid anticipatory mechanisms ...

The concept of the "mnemonic scotoma," a spatially circumscribed region of working memory impairment produced by unilateral lesions of the pFC, is central to the view that pFC is critical for the short-term retention of information. Presented here, however, are previously unpublished data that offer an alternative, nonmnemonic interpretation of ...

Locating a target in a visual search task is facilitated when the target location is repeated on successive trials. Global statistical properties also influence visual search, but have often been confounded with local regularities (i.e., target location repetition). In two experiments, target locations were not repeated for four successive trials, ...

The error-related negativity (ERN) and positivity (Pe) are components of event-related potential (ERP) waveforms recorded from humans and are thought to reflect performance monitoring. Error-related signals have also been found in single-neuron responses and local-field potentials recorded in supplementary eye field and anterior cingulate cortex of macaque monkeys. However, the ...

Valproic acid (VPA) has been suggested as a potential adjunct therapy in schizophrenia for the treatment of clinical symptoms and cognitive deficits. Here, we investigate the effects of VPA on clinical symptoms and saccadic eye movements while controlling for multiple medication effects. Remitted and first-episode schizophrenia patients taking haloperidol were ...

Although several electrophysiological studies have demonstrated the role of theta band during the execution of different visuospatial attention tasks, this study is the first to directly investigate the role of theta power during the planning, execution and cognitive control of saccadic eye movements (SEMs). The current study aims at addressing ...

Poor performance on the antisaccade task has been proposed as a candidate endophenotype in schizophrenia. Caveats to this proposal, however, include inconsistent findings in first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia, and substantial heterogeneity in individuals with the disorder. In this study, we examined antisaccade performance in patients and relatives, and ...

Visuo-spatial representations of the alphabet (so-called 'alphabet forms') may be as common as other types of sequence-space synaesthesia, but little is known about them or the way they relate to implicit spatial associations in the general population. In the first study, we describe the characteristics of a large sample of ...

Antisaccades are directed away from visual targets. Impaired antisaccade generation has been attributed to frontal lobe damage. We studied antisaccades in patients with unilateral focal parietal lobe lesions. Normal subjects (N = 10) instructed to make 10° antisaccades opposite to a 100-ms target flash 10° to the right or left of ...

This study aimed at analyzing the relationship between slow- and fast-alpha asymmetry within frontal cortex and the planning, execution and voluntary control of saccadic eye movements (SEM), and quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) was recorded using a 20-channel EEG system in 12 healthy participants performing a fixed (i.e., memory-driven) and a random ...

Saccades are a potentially important biomarker of Huntington disease (HD) progression, as saccadic abnormalities can be detected both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Although vertical saccadic impairment was reported decades ago, recent studies have focused on horizontal saccades. This study investigated antisaccade (AS) and memory guided saccade (MG) impairment in both the ...

Sequential sampling models provide a useful framework for understanding human decision making. A key component of these models is an evidence accumulation process in which information is accrued over time to a threshold, at which point a choice is made. Previous neurophysiological studies on perceptual decision making have suggested accumulation ...

Adaptive behavior in a nonstationary world requires humans to learn and track the statistics of the environment. We examined the mechanisms of adaptation in a nonstationary environment in the context of visual-saccadic inhibition of return (IOR). IOR is adapted to the likelihood that return locations will be refixated in the ...

Monkey studies report greater activity in the lateral intraparietal area and more efficient saccades when targets coincide with the location of prior reward cues, even when cue location does not indicate which responses will be rewarded. This suggests that reward can modulate spatial attention and visual selection independent of the ...

Many individuals expect that alcohol and drug consumption will enhance creativity. The present studies tested whether substance related primes would influence creative performance for individuals who possessed creativity-related substance expectancies. Participants (n = 566) were briefly exposed to stimuli related to psychoactive substances (alcohol, for Study 1, Sample 1, and ...

In the antisaccade task, healthy participants often make errors by saccading towards the sudden onset target, despite instructions to saccade to the mirror image location. One interesting and relatively unexplored feature of antisaccade performance is that participants are typically unaware of a large proportion of the errors they make. Across ...

The role of top-down control in visual search has been a subject of much debate. Recent research has focused on whether attentional and oculomotor capture by irrelevant salient distractors can be modulated through top-down control, and if so, whether top-down control can be rapidly initiated based on current task goals. ...

Saccadic reaction time (SRT) is more strongly slowed by target-similar than dissimilar distractors (similarity effect). The time course of this similarity effect was investigated by varying target contrast and analyzing SRT distributions. With foveal distractors, the similarity effect increased with increasing SRT, suggesting that top-down enhancement of target features increased ...

Recent investigations have revealed the kinematics of horizontal saccades are less variable near the end of the trajectory than during the course of execution. Converging evidence indicates that oculomotor networks use online sensorimotor feedback to correct for initial trajectory errors. It is also known that oculomotor networks express saccadic corrections ...

The cognitive control of action requires both the suppression of automatic responses to sudden stimuli and the generation of behavior specified by abstract instructions. Though patient, functional imaging and neurophysiological studies have implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in these abilities, the mechanism by which the dlPFC exerts this control ...

Choice behavior and its neural correlates have been intensely studied with tasks in which a subject makes a perceptual judgment and indicates the result with a motor action. Yet a question crucial for relating behavior to neural activity remains unresolved: what fraction of a subject's reaction time (RT) is devoted ...

The set size effect in visual search refers to the linear increase in response time (RT) or decrease in accuracy as the number of distractors increases. Previous human and monkey studies have reported a correlation between set size and neural activity in the frontal eye field (FEF) and intraparietal sulcus ...

Numerous studies have shown that Parkinson's disease (PD) affects the ability to generate voluntary saccades and the ability to suppress reflexive saccades. The effects of PD on the generation of reflexive saccades, however, are not clear. Some studies report impairments, but there are also reports of abnormal facilitation or hyper-reflexivity ...

Cognitive and computational models assume that visual attention is directed to the most salient stimulus in a given scene, and physiological models suggest the attribution of salience might depend on the extrageniculate pathway, involving the superior colliculus and pulvinar. Empirical findings support these models. Another assumption is that attention progresses ...

Orienting visual attention is of fundamental importance when viewing a visual scene. One of the areas thought to play a role in the guidance of this process is the posterior parietal cortex. In this review, we will describe the way the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of the posterior parietal cortex ...

To assess the neuropsychological and anatomical correlates of anti-saccade (AS) task performance in normal elders. The AS task correlates with neuropsychological measures of executive function and frontal lobe volume in neurological diseases, but has not been studied in a well-characterized normal elderly population. Because executive dysfunction can indicate an increased ...

It has been suggested that independent bottom-up and top-down processes govern saccadic selection. However, recent findings are hard to explain in such terms. We hypothesized that differences in visual-processing time can explain these findings, and we tested this using search displays containing two deviating elements, one requiring a short processing ...

Standard protocols testing the orientation of visuospatial attention usually present spatial cues before targets and compare valid-cue trials with invalid-cue trials. The valid/invalid contrast results in a relative behavioral or physiological difference that is generally interpreted as a benefit of attention orientation. However, growing evidence suggests that inhibitory control of ...

To foveate a visual target, subjects usually execute a primary hypometric saccade (S1) bringing the target in perifoveal vision, followed by a corrective saccade (S2) or by more than one S2. It is still debated to what extent these S2 are pre-programmed or dependent only on post-saccadic retinal error. To ...

Alcohol produces both stimulant and sedating effects in humans. These two seemingly opposite effects are central to the understanding of much of the literature on alcohol use and misuse. In this chapter we review studies that describe and attempt to measure various aspects of alcohol's subjective, autonomic, motor, cognitive and ...

RATIONALE: Alcohol impairs the brain's detection of performance errors as evidenced by attenuated error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential (ERP) thought to reflect a brain system that monitors one's behavior. However, it remains unclear whether alcohol impairs performance-monitoring capacity across a broader range of contexts, including those entailing external feedback. ...

Reflexive and voluntary levels of processing have been studied extensively with respect to possible impairments due to alcohol intoxication. This study examined alcohol effects at the 'automated' level of processing essential to many complex visual processing tasks (e.g., reading, visual search) that involve ongoing modifications or reprogramming of well-practiced routines. ...

RATIONALE: Acute alcohol intoxication selectively impairs executive functioning and prospective memory (PM). Much previous researches in this area have used laboratory-based tasks that may not mimic functions that individuals with dysexecutive syndrome have problems with in their everyday life. The present study aimed to assess the effects of a modest ...

Children exposed to alcohol prenatally suffer from a range of physical, neuropathological, and behavioral alterations, referred to as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). Both the cerebellum and hippocampus are affected by alcohol exposure during development, which may contribute to behavioral and cognitive deficits observed in children with FASD. Despite the ...

RATIONALE: Successful response inhibition is associated with right-lateralized inferior frontal cortex (IFC) activity, and alcohol impairs this inhibitory control, thereby enhancing false-alarm responses in the Go/No-Go task. However, the neural correlates of effect of alcohol on response inhibition remain unclear. OBJECTIVE: This study characterized the acute effects of alcohol on ...

Objective: As emotion regulation is widely considered to be a primary motive in the misuse of alcohol, our aim in the study was to investigate whether deficits in adaptive emotion-regulation skills maintain alcohol dependence (AD). Method: A prospective study investigated whether emotion-regulation skills were associated with AD and whether these ...

Several recent studies suggest that alcohol-related cues elicit automatic approach tendencies in heavy drinkers. A variety of tasks have been used to demonstrate these effects, including Relevant Stimulus-Response Compatibility (R-SRC) tasks and variants of Simon tasks. Previous work with normative stimuli suggests that the R-SRC task may be more sensitive ...

Recent brain-imaging studies revealed that the development and maintenance of alcohol dependence is determined by a complex interaction of different neurotransmitter systems and multiple psychological factors. In this context, the dopaminergic reinforcement system appears to be of fundamental importance. We focus on the excitatory and depressant effects of acute versus ...

Decrements in verbal memory are commonly reported by detoxified treatment-seeking individuals. Although acute nicotine has been shown to improve attentional performance, its effects on verbal memory in substance abusers have not been addressed. Treatment-seeking alcohol-dependent (ALCs, n = 29; 14 male), illicit-stimulant-dependent (predominantly cocaine; STIMs, n = 25; 15 male), ...

Recent studies have linked alcoholism with a dysfunctional neural reward system. Although several electrophysiological studies have explored reward processing in healthy individuals, such studies in alcohol-dependent individuals are quite rare. The present study examines theta oscillations during reward processing in abstinent alcoholics. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded in 38 abstinent ...

Objective: This study provided the first direct test of the cognitive underpinnings of the attention-allocation model and attempted to replicate and extend past behavioral findings for this model as an explanation for alcohol-related aggression. Method: A diverse community sample (55% African American) of men (N = 159) between 21 and ...

Abstract Objectives. Neurotoxic effects of alcohol consumption are well-known. There is plenty of literature on frontal lobe impairment on the behavioural and structural brain imaging level. However, only few functional imaging studies investigated altered neural patterns and even less abstinence-related neural recovery. Methods. In a cross-sectional design three patient groups ...