Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Studying Everyday Eye Movements Could Aid in Diagnosis of Neurological Disorders
USC-led team has designed a low-cost, easily-deployed method for detecting ADHD, Parkinson’s, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
Researchers at the University of Southern California have devised a method for detecting certain neurological disorders through the study of eye movements.
In a study published today in the Journal of Neurology, researchers claim that because Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Parkinson’s Disease (PD) each involve ocular control and attention dysfunctions, they can be easily identified through an evaluation of how patients move their eyes while they watch television.
“Natural attention and eye movement behavior – like a drop of saliva – contains a biometric signature of an individual and her/his state of brain function or dysfunction,” the article states. “Such individual signatures, and especially potential biomarkers of particular neurological disorders which they may contain, however, have not yet been successfully decoded.”
Typical methods of detection—clinical evaluation, structured behavioral tasks and neuroimaging—are costly, labor-intensive and limited by a patient’s ability to understand and comply with instructions. To solve this problem, doctoral student Po-He Tseng and Professor Laurent Itti of the Department of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, along with collaborators at Queen’s University in Canada, have devised a new screening method.
Participants in the study were simply instructed to “watch and enjoy” television clips for 20 minutes while their eye movements were recorded. Eye-tracking data was then combined with normative eye-tracking data and a computational model of visual attention to extract 224 quantitative features, allowing the team to use new machine learning techniques to identify critical features that differentiated patients from control subjects.
With eye movement data from 108 subjects, the team was able to identify older adults with Parkinson’s Disease with 89.6% accuracy, and children with either ADHD or FASD with 77.3% accuracy.
Providing new insights into which aspects of attention and gaze control are affected by specific disorders, the team’s method provides considerable promise as an easily-deployed, low-cost, high-throughput screening tool, especially for young children and elderly populations who may be less compliant to traditional tests.
“For the first time, we can actually decode a person’s neurological state from their everyday behavior, without having to subject them to difficult or time-consuming tests,” Itti said.
This woman wants to get inside teenagers’ grey matter — by scanning their brains. “Ten years ago, there was virtually nothing out there about adolescents’ brains,” says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. “MRI scanning reveals how they change, well into adulthood.”
When Blakemore, 37, began studying teenagers’ brains through behavioural testing and MRI scans eight years ago, she found that the parts of the brain responsible for empathy and social intelligence were soft and constantly morphing. Other studies showed that brains adapt and learn well into adulthood — an important implication for education. "If a child in the UK falls through the net early, the political thinking is that it’s too late to spend public money on them," she says. "That’s not true — funding should be maintained through to their twenties."
To this end, she has helped to set up the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, an inter-institutional project in London which aims to influence educational policy. “We need to instil confidence in teenagers,” she says. As long as they tidy their rooms first.
Source: Wired.co.uk
Adding to the mounting evidence that consuming moderate amounts of chocoloate may benefit the heart, comes that of a new study of Swedish men that suggests it may also lower the risk of stroke.
Are you addicted to the Internet? You might be able to blame your genes.
Scientists say they’ve found a link between a toxic relationship with the Web and a genetic quirk that also plays a role in nicotine addiction.
Researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany interviewed 843 people about their online habits. Of them, 132 showed signs of an unhealthy relationship with the Internet — all of their thoughts revolved around it and their sense of wellbeing was shaken if they couldn’t go online. By comparing the genes of the two groups, the researchers found the subset of likely Internet addicts more often carried a mutation the CHRNA4 gene, which is typically linked to nicotine addiction.
Re-opening Windows: Manipulating Critical Periods for Brain Development
The brain acquires certain skills—from visual perception to language—during critical windows, specific times in early life when the brain is actively shaped by environmental input. Scientists like Takao K. Hensch are now discovering pathways in animal models through which these windows might be re-opened in adults, thus re-awakening a brain’s youth-like plasticity. Such research has implications for brain injury repair, sensory recovery, and neurodevelopmental disorder treatment. In addition, what we know today about these critical windows of development already has enormous implications for social and educational policy.
Standard head movements made while exposed to one of the three electromagnetic fields produced by a heavy duty MRI scanner seem to temporarily lower concentration and visuospatial awareness, shows an experimental study published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Thirty one volunteers made standard head movements within the static magnetic field of a higher field 7 Tesla MRI scanner at exposure levels of zero (sham), 0.5 (medium), and 1 (high)Tesla, in a random order, one week apart.
After each exposure level, the volunteers were set 12 timed cognitive tasks, designed to test the sorts of skills that a surgeon or other healthcare professional might need to deploy within the vicinity of an MRI scanner.
These included visual tracking and movement, as well as more general functions, such as attention, concentration and working memory. The tests were neutral in that they didn’t test intelligence or depend on practice.
In all, 30 volunteers completed all three sessions. Compared with the sham test, the results showed that the more general functions, such as attention and concentration, and visuospatial awareness were significantly affected.
Alzheimer’s triggered by “type three diabetes”
An unhealthy diet could lead to Alzheimer’s disease by triggering a form of insulin resistance dubbed “type three diabetes”, scientists claim.
Photo: Getty Images/Peter Macdiarmid
High levels of the hormone insulin, brought on by a bad diet, may harm the brain in the same way that the muscle, liver and fat cells are affected by type two diabetes. Exposing the brain to too much insulin could cause it to stop responding to the hormone, hampering our ability to think and create new memories and ultimately leading to permanent damage, researchers said.
A diet high in fat and sugar has long been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s, while studies of health among large populations have shown that a healthy Mediterranean diet may offer some protection. In type two diabetes, eating too much fatty and sugary food raises our insulin levels to such a consistently high degree that our muscles, fat and liver cells are no longer affected by the hormone.
This means that the amount of glucose and fat in our blood is allowed to increase unchecked, forcing the pancreas to produce even more insulin to try to cope. Ultimately it becomes exhausted and production drops to very low levels.
A small-scale trial on human patients at Washington University found that those who were given a nasal spray containing insulin were better at remembering details of stories, had longer attention spans and were more independent. A further trial on 240 volunteers showing early signs of dementia will provide further clues as to whether the spray can protect memory and learning ability and keep track of brain changes in patients.
A study on rats by experts from Brown University suggest that a similar process could affect the brain, which relies on insulin to regulate nerve signals related to memory and learning and to produce energy from glucose. Researchers found that blocking insulin from rats’ brains made them disorientated and unable to find their way out of a maze because they could not remember where they were.
Examination of their brains showed the same pattern of deterioration seen in Alzheimer’s patients, including increased levels of the amyloid plaque which is a key hallmark of the condition. If the theory is correct, it means eating more healthy foods and exercising more could reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, and potentially reverse or slow down the memory loss in patients with the condition.
Dr Suzanne de la Monte, who led the study, told New Scientist magazine: “[The rats] were demented. They couldn’t learn or remember. “I believe [Alzheimer’s] starts with insulin resistance. If you can avoid brain diabetes you’ll be fine. But once it gets going you are going to need to attack on multiple fronts.”
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Expectant mothers are used to fuzzy images on ultrasound monitors and blood tests to screen for potential health problems in their unborn babies. But what if one of those blood tests came back with a readout of the baby’s entire genome? What if a simple test gave parents every nuance of a baby’s genetic makeup before birth?
Recent studies show that it’s possible to decode an entire fetal genome from a sample of the mother’s blood. In the future, doctors may be able to divine a wealth of information about genetic diseases or other characteristics of a fetus from the pregnant mother’s blood. Such tests will raise ethical questions about how to act on such information. But they could also lead to research on treating diseases before birth, and leave parents and their doctors better prepared to care for babies after birth.
Neuroscience - the science of the brain and how it works - is taking the stand and beginning to challenge society’s notions of crime and punishment.
Experts say it’s almost inevitable that neuroscience and law will become yet more intertwined. After all, while neuroscience seeks to find out how the brain functions and affects behavior, the law’s main concern is with regulating behavior. Yet many are uneasy about the use in courts of law - and in matters of life and death - of basic science that is only just creeping out of the lab.
"All sorts of types of neuroscience evidence are being used for all sorts of types of claims," says Teneille Brown, a professor of law at the University of Utah. "The question is, is this technology really ready for prime time, or is it being abused? … Neuroscience is being used by serious scientists in real labs, but the people trying to apply it in courts are not those same people … So they’re taking something that looks very objective, that looks like gold standard science, but then morphing it into a forensic use it wasn’t developed for."
For 25 years, the rhesus monkeys were kept semi-starved, lean and hungry. The males’ weights were so low they were the equivalent of a 6-foot-tall man who tipped the scales at just 120 to 133 pounds. The hope was that if the monkeys lived longer, healthier lives by eating a lot less, then maybe people, their evolutionary cousins, would, too. Some scientists, anticipating such benefits, began severely restricting their own diets.
The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the when they were old. The causes of death — , heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.