Superior Visual Timing Sensitivity in Auditory But Not Visual World Class Drum Corps Experts

Drum corps color guard experts spend years developing skills in spinning rifles, sabers, and flags. Their expertise provides a unique window into factors that govern sensitivity to the speed of rotational and radial motion. Prior neurophysiological research demonstrates that rotational and radial motion register in the Medial Superior Temporal (MST) region of the primate visual system. To the extent that shared neural events govern rotational and radial speed sensitivity, one would expect expertise on either task to transfer to the other. One similarly would expect shared neural events to generate correlations between rotational and radial speed sensitivity. We evaluated these predictions via visual speed sensitivity tests on drum corps color guard experts, drum corps low brass experts, and other age-matched control participants. Displays comprised bilaterally presented plaid patterns that rotated, radiated, or both. Participants reported which side contained faster motion. The data revealed a modest but reliably reproducible and specific group-by-task interaction; color guard speed sensitivity exhibited a rotational motion advantage and radial motion disadvantage. Additionally, rotational and radial speed sensitivity failed to predict each other significantly. Overall, the findings match predictions that follow from a dissociation between the neural events governing rotational and radial speed sensitivity.

Neurophysiological experiments have shown that a shared region of the primate visual system registers both radial and rotational motion. Radial and rotational motion also share computational features. Despite these neural and computational similarities, prior experiments have disrupted radial, but not rotational, motion sensitivity -a single dissociation. Here we report stimulus manipulations that extend the single dissociation to a double dissociation, thereby showing further separability between radial and rotational motion sensitivity. In Exp 1 bilateral plaid stimuli with or without phase-noise either radiated or rotated before changing direction. College students reported whether the direction changed first on the left or right–a temporal order judgment (TOJ). Phase noise generated significantly larger disruptions to rotational TOJs than to radial TOJs, thereby completing the double dissociation. In Exp 2 we conceptually replicated this double dissociation by switching the task from TOJs to simultaneity judgments (SJs). Phase noise generated significantly larger disruptions to rotational SJs than to radial SJs. This disruption pattern reversed after changing the plaids’ motion from same- to opposite-initial directions. The double dissociations reported here revealed distinct dependencies for radial and rotational motion sensitivity. Radial motion sensitivity depended strongly on information about global depth. Rotational motion sensitivity depended strongly on positional information about local luminance gradients. These distinct dependencies arose downstream from the neural mechanisms that detect local linear components within radial and rotational motion. Overall, the differential impairments generated by our psychophysical experiments demonstrate independence between radial and rotational motion sensitivity, despite their neural and computational similarities.

Visuomotor adaptation to rightward-deviating optical-wedge prisms reduces the clinical manifestations of spatial neglect after right hemisphere damage. We investigated whether this beneficial effect of prism adaptation is due to attenuation of the ipsilesional attentional bias that is common in spatial neglect. Five right hemisphere patients performed visual temporal order judgements before and after visuomotor adaptation to 15 degrees rightward-deviating prisms. The magnitude of patients' ipsilesional attentional bias on the temporal order judgement task was significantly reduced following adaptation. By contrast, the temporal order judgements of normal participants did not change following adaptation to either leftward- or rightward-deviating prisms. The findings suggest that prism adaptation helps to rebalance the distribution of spatial attention following right hemisphere damage.

Atypical processing of stimulus inputs across a range of sensory modalities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is widely reported. Sensory processing is known to be influenced by bodily internal states such as physiological arousal and anxiety. As a sizeable proportion of ASD reportedly have co-morbid anxiety disorders that are linked with dysregulated arousal, we investigated if face emotion arousal cues influenced visual sensory sensitivity (indexed by temporal resolution) in ASD (n=20) compared to a matched group of typically developed individuals (TD, n=21). We asked further if emotion-cued changes in visual sensitivity were associated with individual differences in state and trait anxiety. Participants reported the laterality of the second of two consecutive Gaussian-blob flashes in a visual temporal order judgment task (v-TOJ), demanding higher-level visual processing. The key manipulation was presenting a task-irrelevant face emotion cue briefly at unexpected time points preceding the task-relevant flashes. Disgust vs. Neutral emotion signals significantly enhanced the visual temporal resolution in ASD. Individual state-anxiety scores showed a fair correlative trend with the emotion-cued changes in temporal resolution (Disgust versus Neutral) in ASD but missed statistical significance. Both these effects were absent in TD. The results show that individual state-anxiety levels likely modulate the effect of emotions on visual temporal sensitivity in ASD. The findings support a nuanced approach to understand the disparate sensory features in ASD, by factoring in the interplay of the individual reactivity to environmental affective information and the severity of anxiety.

BackgroundThe mismatch negativity (MMN) is an electrophysiological index of early auditory attention and has repeatedly been suggested to be associated with cognitive functioning. Despite the frequently reported finding of reduced MMN amplitude in schizophrenia, up to now, studies assessing the impact of perceptual discrimination training aiming to improve MMN measures in schizophrenia patients are scarce. MethodIn the present study, the effect of auditory training (AUD, n=14) on the MMN was compared to that of visual-spatial training (VIS, n=14) and a treatment-as-usual (TAU, n=14) condition in schizophrenia patients. Training consisted of ten 50-min sessions over two weeks. Assessments took place before and after training and at a two-month follow-up. They comprised clinical measures and MMN recordings to frequency and duration deviant stimuli. ResultsThere was a significant main effect for type of stimulus deviance with a more negative MMN to frequency than duration deviants. In contrast to our hypotheses, we did not find training specific effects on MMN amplitude or latency. ConclusionThe visual, as well as the auditory training program failed to result in treatment related MMN changes in schizophrenia patients when compared to treatment-as-usual as a control condition. In contrast to reports in healthy subjects, the induction of training related MMN changes in schizophrenia patients may constitute a specific challenge and require more extensive training protocols.

Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an illusion in which we perceive a change in color earlier than a change in motion direction when the two changes occur simultaneously. This phenomenon may indicate that color is processed earlier than motion in the visual system. However, the very existence of CMA is under question owing to contradictory findings and methodological deficits in previous studies. Here, we used both the motion and color correspondence tasks (experiment 1) and the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task (experiment 2) to re-examine CMA. Colored dots moved in one direction and changed their color/direction at some time, whereas the relative timing between color and direction changes varied across trials. In the correspondence task, participants reported which direction/color of dots with a particular color/direction lasted longer, the one before or after the change? In the TOJ task, participants reported whether the change in color or the change in motion direction occurred earlier. Results indicated that participants perceived the change in color earlier than the change in motion direction in either the motion or color correspondence task, with a stronger asynchrony in the former. In the TOJ task, although participants showed no difference in psychophysical measures, they responded faster when the change in color occurred before (versus after) the change in direction. Drift-diffusion modeling (DDM) revealed a lower decision threshold when the change in color occurred before (versus after) the change in direction, indicating less cautiousness was excised in judgment when the color changed earlier. These results confirmed the veracity of CMA in different tasks and point to the viability of analyzing response times in traditional psychophysical studies.

: The building blocks of effective sports vision are visual acuity and contrast sensitivity. Proper measurement of these spatial vision attributes is necessary for repeatability in the clinic or in the laboratory. The most repeatable method of testing visual acuity is with logMAR charts-either the Bailey-Lovie chart or the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study chart. The Pelli-Robson and the Mars are the most repeatable contrast sensitivity tests. Athletes may or may not demonstrate superior visual acuity and contrast sensitivity compared with age-matched nonathlete populations, and the optical quality of their eyes may be similar. Dynamic visual acuity in athletes and their performance are typically superior to those of nonathletes. How these differences relate to on-field performance is not known. Other changes to the visual system because of refractive surgery or contact lens wear may increase higher order aberrations and reduce low-contrast visual acuity. The ability to improve already-normal visual acuity is unclear although contrast sensitivity can improve with fast-paced video games. Tinted contact lenses help reduce discomfort glare and speed up adaptation but do not have an appreciable effect on visual acuity and contrast sensitivity. The use of valid and repeatable visual acuity and contrast sensitivity tests is essential for measuring the differences in visual performance among athletes and nonathletes. The development of a standardized dynamic visual acuity test is needed as are well-controlled scientific studies to evaluate the benefits of sports vision training.

We have shown previously that amblyopia involves impaired detection of asynchrony between auditory and visual events. To distinguish whether this impairment represents a defect in temporal integration or nonintegrative multisensory processing (e.g., cross-modal matching), we used the temporal ventriloquism effect in which visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) is normally enhanced by a lagging auditory click. Participants with amblyopia (n = 9) and normally sighted controls (n = 9) performed a visual TOJ task. Pairs of clicks accompanied the two lights such that the first click preceded the first light, or second click lagged the second light by 100, 200, or 450 ms. Baseline audiovisual synchrony and visual-only conditions also were tested. Within both groups, just noticeable differences for the visual TOJ task were significantly reduced compared with baseline in the 100- and 200-ms click lag conditions. Within the amblyopia group, poorer stereo acuity and poorer visual acuity in the amblyopic eye were significantly associated with greater enhancement in visual TOJ performance in the 200-ms click lag condition. Audiovisual temporal integration is intact in amblyopia, as indicated by perceptual enhancement in the temporal ventriloquism effect. Furthermore, poorer stereo acuity and poorer visual acuity in the amblyopic eye are associated with a widened temporal binding window for the effect. These findings suggest that previously reported abnormalities in audiovisual multisensory processing may result from impaired cross-modal matching rather than a diminished capacity for temporal audiovisual integration.

This study aimed to examine the effects of temporal processing training on the reading abilities of Chinese children with dyslexia. In total, 69 Chinese children with dyslexia in grades three through six were recruited in Taiwan. The children were divided into the following three equal groups: (1) auditory temporal processing training group, (2) visual temporal processing training group, and (3) control group with no specific training. The participants in both training groups received instruction with identical durations (30-40min), intensities (12 times in total), and frequencies (three to four times per week). The participants in the control group were asked to independently surf some specified websites using devices similar to those used by the two experimental groups for an identical duration, intensity, and frequency. Our results indicated that the two groups who received temporal processing training exhibited significant correlations among Chinese character reading, rapid naming, and corresponding reading-related abilities, while visual temporal processing served as a significant predictor of Chinese character reading ability even if all background data, reading-related abilities, and auditory temporal processing were introduced first. Additionally, significant interactions were found between the Groups and Tested sessions in all the measures, except for phonological awareness, confirming the distinct effects of different temporal processing on most measures involved in this study. Further simple main effects revealed that only those who received the visual temporal processing training gained benefits in the corresponding reading-related ability (i.e., orthographic knowledge) and far-transfer to Chinese character reading.

Assessment of outcome measures after audiological computer-based auditory training in cochlear implant children

Learning effects of dynamic postural control by auditory biofeedback versus visual biofeedback training

Background Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder, and one of its core symptoms is cognitive impairment, which seriously affects the patient’s daily life, social function, and rehabilitation outcomes. Visual scanning imaging technology, as an emerging and objective means of assessing cognitive function, can accurately capture indicators such as eye movement trajectory and gaze time of patients during visual information processing, providing a new perspective for a deeper understanding of cognitive function. The research aims to explore whether a new training mode that integrates vision and hearing can more effectively improve the cognitive function of patients with schizophrenia, and to comprehensively and objectively evaluate the training effect using visual scanning imaging analysis technology. Methods The study recruited 50 patients with schizophrenia as the experimental group and 50 healthy volunteers matched for age, gender, etc. as the control group. Firstly, conduct a comprehensive clinical evaluation of all participants, including medical history collection, assessment of psychiatric symptoms, etc. Then, the DEM-2000 eye tracker was used to conduct baseline visual scanning imaging tests on the two groups of participants, recording their eye movement data during scene browsing and target search, including the number of fixation points, fixation time, scanning path, etc. The experimental group received 10 weeks of visual and auditory fusion training. The training content includes visual stimulation tasks and synchronized auditory guidance. The training frequency is 3 times a week, with each session lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the training, visual scanning imaging tests were conducted again on the experimental group patients and the control group to obtain visual cognitive data after training. Results The comparison of data before and after training is shown in Table 1. Before training, the experimental group had an average of 25 fixation points, while the control group had 40 fixation points. After training, the average number of fixation points in the experimental group was 35, an increase of 40% compared to before training. The standard deviation of average fixation time is 9 ms, which is 25% lower than before training. In terms of attention testing, the average correct reaction time of the experimental group before training was 800 ms, which was shortened to 600 ms after training. In memory tests, the average number of correct memories before training was 4, which increased to 7 after training. Discussion The training mode that integrates visual and auditory senses has a positive effect on improving cognitive function in patients with schizophrenia, and visual scanning imaging technology can effectively capture the manifestation of this improvement at the visual cognitive level. Funding No. Pdjh2024a557.

Tracking Speckles: Overcoming Conventions to Evaluate Right Ventricular Function.

Backgrounds The treatment for amblyopia can have a substantial impact on quality of life. Conventional treatments for amblyopia have some limitations, then we try to explore a new and effective method to treat amblyopia. This study aimed to determine the potential effect of short-term plastic visual perceptual training based on VR and AR platforms in amblyopic patients. Methods All observers were blinded to patient groupings. A total of 145 amblyopic children were randomly assigned into 2 groups: VR group (71 patients) and AR group (74 patients). In the VR group, each subject underwent a 20-min short-term plastic visual perceptual training based on a VR platform, and in the AR group, based on an AR platform. The best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), fine stereopsis, and contrast sensitivity function (CSF) were measured before and after training. Results The BCVA (P < 0.001) and fine stereopsis (P < 0.05) were improved significantly both in VR and AR group after training. Moreover, in the AR group, the CSF showed the value of all spatial frequencies had a statistically significant improvement after training (P < 0.05), while in the VR group, only the value of spatial frequency 12 improved significantly (P = 0.008). Conclusions This study showed that the short-term plastic visual perceptual training based on VR and AR technology can improve BCVA, fine stereopsis and CSF of refractive amblyopia. It was suggested that the visual perceptual training based on the VR and AR platforms may be potentially applied in treatment for amblyopia and provided a high-immersing alternative.

Three adult amblyopic patients who underwent vision training involving monocular occlusion of the nonamblyopic eye and stimulation of the amblyopic eye using simple fixation exercises and a spinning grating procedure were evaluated using five different types of acuity testing and two methods of contrast sensitivity. It was found that contrast sensitivity and isolated Landolt C acuity improved sooner and to a greater extent than the more complex visual acuity tasks. One patient who improved only on the simpler tasks complained that the enhanced contrast due to training made vision in that eye less acceptable because it was more confusing. The results show that multiple measures of visual acuity and contrast sensitivity are necessary to adequately monitor the effects of occlusion therapy.