Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Look into my eyes... I will tell you if you have a disorder!

So I went through about 25+ articles trying to find evidence supporting that antisaccade tasks were effective at detecting impaired inhibition.  Makes sense right? If you can't stop yourself from doing something then you probably have an impaired inhibition component of executive functioning.  Well that's exactly what the antisaccade task does.  McDowell et al. (2002) used an antisaccade task on schizophrenic patients who are known to have a deficient inhibition mechanism.  Now the results may seem intuitive to you all, schizophrenics will generate more errors and have higher latencies, but its kinda important all the same.  If schizophrenics have a lower inhibition mechanism and the antisaccade task can detect that, then its possible that many other disorders have it too and the antisaccade task can detect that too... In fact, its possible that certain disorders can be treated effectively simply by teaching people how to be more in control of themselves, for example eating disorders.  Imagine that, being able to tell if people have a disorder simply by looking into their eyes!  Now of course, that's stretching the bounds of scientific methodology, but its interesting no?  To be able to tell, at least partly, that certain individuals may have some sort of impairment based on how they move their eyes. Gives new meaning to looking into someone's eyes doesn't it?

1 comment:

  1. That would be the dream to measure everyone's eye's. But the eye direction or gaze can be easily measured now = by eyetrackers and we (us researchers) can deduce where they are attending. What they are attending to and try to infer why.
    Keep the blog's coming.

    ReplyDelete