An eye-tracking study of face and object recognition was conducted to clarify the character of face gaze in autistic spectrum disorders. Experimental participants were a group of individuals diagnosed with Asperger's disorder or high-functioning autistic disorder according to their medical records and confirmed by the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R). Controls were selected on the basis of age, gender, and educational level to be comparable to the experimental group. In order to maintain attentional focus, stereoscopic images were presented in a virtual reality (VR) headset in which the eye-tracking system was installed. Preliminary analyses show impairment in face recognition, in contrast with equivalent and even superior performance in object recognition among participants with autism-related diagnoses, relative to controls. Experimental participants displayed less fixation on the central face than did control-group participants. The findings, within the limitations of the small number of subjects and technical difficulties encountered in utilizing the helmet-mounted display, suggest an impairment in face processing on the part of the individuals in the experimental group. This is consistent with the hypothesis of disruption in the first months of life, a period that may be critical to typical social and cognitive development, and has important implications for selection of appropriate targets of intervention.
Complaints of feeling unfocused and being unable to concentrate are common during smoking cessation, and such feelings may contribute to a subtle erosion of the motivation to quit. A heterogeneous sample of 21 established smokers (10 women, 11 men) completed this double-blind, placebo-controlled study to test the hypothesis that nicotine replacement during cessation therapy (using a 21-mg nicotine patch) would improve performance on tasks sensitive to nicotine deprivation. Participants were trained to stable performance on simple reaction time, mathematical processing, Sternberg memory, rapid visual-information processing, grammatical reasoning, and the Stroop Color-Word (Stroop) tasks. They received smoking cessation counseling and were randomly assigned to nicotine patch and placebo patch groups. Performance was assessed prior to cessation, and early (days 2 and 3) and late (days 5 through 7) in the first cessation week. The hypothesis was not supported. Increased accuracy was associated with the patch only for grammatical reasoning. No reaction time differences were found in the simple reaction time, grammatical reasoning, and mathematical processing tasks. Reaction time was faster in the placebo group on the more difficult portions of those tasks requiring sustained attention (rapid visual-information processing, Stroop Color-Word, and Sternberg memory tasks). These results differ substantially from those obtained when young adults are allowed to smoke or chew nicotine gum after relatively brief periods of deprivation. Evidence that smoking may interfere with cognition is accumulating; these results support this view. The subjective performance decrements noted by many smokers during cessation may be related to overall negative affect, rather than to direct effects on cognition and attention.
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