The capacity to learn new visuomotor associations is fundamental to adaptive motor behavior. Evidence suggests visuomotor learning deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the exact nature of these deficits and the ability of dopamine medication to improve them are under-explored. Previous studies suggested that learning driven by large and…

The superior parietal cortex is critical for the control of visually guided actions. Research suggests that visual stimuli relevant to actions are preferentially processed when they are in peripersonal space. One recent study demonstrated that visually guided movements towards the body were more impaired in a patient with damage to superior…

Schizophrenia patients exhibit perceptual and cognitive deficits, including in visual motion processing. Given that cognitive systems depend upon perceptual inputs, improving patients' perceptual abilities may be an effective means of cognitive intervention. In healthy people, motion perception can be enhanced through perceptual learning, but it…

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) typically suffer from an asymmetric degeneration of dopaminergic cells in the substantia nigra, resulting in right-sided (RPD) or left-sided (LPD) predominance of motor symptomatology. As the dopaminergic system is also involved in attention, we examined horizontal and vertical orienting of attention in LPD…

When young adults carry out visual search, distractors that are semantically related, rather than unrelated, to targets can disrupt target selection (see [Belke et al., 2008] and [Moores et al., 2003]). This effect is apparent on the first eye movements in search, suggesting that attention is sometimes captured by related distractors. Here we…

The neuropsychological literature on the processing of emotions in Parkinson's disease (PD) reveals conflicting evidence about the role of the basal ganglia in the recognition of facial emotions. Hence, the present study had two objectives. One was to determine the extent to which the visual processing of emotions and objects differs in PD. The…

This study investigated the relation between cerebral damage related to multiple sclerosis (MS) and cognitive decline as determined by two classical mental tracking tests. Cerebral damage in 15 relapsing-remitting MS patients was measured by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Fractional anisotropy, longitudinal and transverse diffusivity were defined…

Normal observers demonstrate a bias to process the left sides of faces during perceptual judgments about identity or emotion. This effect suggests a right cerebral hemisphere processing bias. To test the role of the right hemisphere and the involvement of configural processing underlying this effect, young and older control observers and patients…

Modern cognitive neuroscientific theories and empirical evidence suggest that brain structures involved in movement may be related to action-related semantic knowledge. To test this hypothesis, we examined the naming of environmental sounds in patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), two…

Cumulative exposure to glucocorticoid hormones (GC) over the lifespan has been associated with cognitive impairment and may contribute to physical and cognitive degeneration in aging. The objective of the present study was to examine whether the pattern of cognitive deficits in patients with Cushing's syndrome (CS), a disorder characterized by…

Previous studies have suggested a right hemineglect in schizophrenia, however few assessed possible visual-perceptual implication in this lateralized anomaly. A manual line bisection without (i.e., lines presented on their own) or with a local cueing paradigm (i.e., a number placed at one or both ends of the line) and the Motor-free Visual…

We hypothesized that the right hemisphere would be superior to the left hemisphere in remembering having seen a specific picture before, given its superiority in perceptually encoding specific aspects of visual form. A large set of pictures (N=1500) of animals, human faces, artifacts, landscapes, and art paintings were shown for 2 s in central…

Several forms of eye movement dysfunction (EMD) are regarded as promising candidate endophenotypes of schizophrenia. Discrepancies in individual study results have led to inconsistent conclusions regarding particular aspects of EMD in relatives of schizophrenia patients. To quantitatively evaluate and compare the candidacy of smooth pursuit,…

The "co-familiality" criterion for an endophenotype has two requirements: (1) clinically unaffected relatives as a group should show both a shift in mean performance and an increase in variance compared with controls; (2) performance scores should be heritable. Performance on the antisaccade task is one of several candidate endophenotypes for…

This review focuses on saccade research with adult psychiatric patients. It begins with an introduction of the various types of saccades and the tasks used to evoke them. The functional significance of the different types of eye movements is briefly discussed. Research findings regarding the saccadic performance of different adult psychiatric…