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YEAR 3
While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, 26
schizophrenia patients and 26 control subjects completed 90
association tasks (i.e., they were provided a cue word, and were
required to choose the more strongly associated of two companion
words). Following scanning, subjects were asked to free-recall and
cue-recall the word pairs viewed in the scanner. Using constrained
principal component analysis with a finite impulse response basis
set, three statistically significant components of neural activity
emerged. Component 1 involved activity in left inferior parietal
lobe, left superior temporal gyrus, bilateral visual cortices and
dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). Component 2 showed
activity in dACC/supplementary motor area, visual cortices,
and left premotor cortex. Component 3 showed deactivation in
medial prefrontal cortices and posterior cingulate/precuneus. For
all components, encoding words that were later not recalled was
associated with higher activation or deactivation than encoding
free- or cue-recalled words; and encoding cue-recalled words
showed higher activation or deactivation than encoding freerecalled
words. For components 1 and 3, schizophrenia patients
exhibited less activation or deactivation than control subjects
when encoding cue-recalled words (p < .05). Greater activity
when encoding non-recalled words, or those only recalled when
cued, may reflect increased difficulty or interference at the
encoding stage. The differences in activity of these components
observed in schizophrenia patients may help elucidate the
variations in associative memory function thought to underlie
many characteristic features of this disease.
Are the Eyes the Windows to the
Human Soul Gaze Direction Study and
its Effects on Attentional Orienting and
Crossmodal Target Responses
Jennifer Quan, Salvador Soto-Faraco, John McDonald,
Alan Kingstone
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
Objective: Human beings are highly social creatures who use
verbal and body language to communicate. Eye contact is a
powerful means of communication. The following 7 experiments
attempts to determine the degree in which the eyes illicit reflexive
responses in human senses from visual, auditory, and tactile
responses; and hopes to answer the age-old question of whether
the eyes are the windows to the soul.
Methodology: A schematic face was shown on a computer screen,
with eyes that were either spatially informative (looked towards the
target) or spatially uninformative (looked in the opposite direction
of the target). Participants were instructed to press either the left
or right button depending on where they thought the visual target
appeared. To measure the effect of eye-gaze on auditory attention,
sound, rather than a visual target, was used as the target. Again,
the participants were asked to input where they thought the sound
originated (left or right). To measure tactile response, the schematic
face was replaced by 4 dots that flashed on the left or right of the
screen. Participants were again asked to input on the response pad
where they thought the sound originated (left or right). Response
times and accuracy were measured for all the experiments.
Results: Eye-gaze cuing produced a shift in visual attention, as
supported by faster response times in the valid trials (when the
eyes pointed towards the visual cues) than in the invalid trials
(when the eyes did not point towards the visual cues) with a
p