Educational and Cognitive Predictors of Pro- and Antisaccadic Performance

Visuospatial, oculomotor, and executive reading skills evolve in elementary school, and errors are significant: a topological RAN study

We investigate the development of visuospatial and oculomotor reading skills in a cohort of elementary school children. Employing a longitudinal methodology, the study applies the Topological serial digit Rapid Automated Naming (Top-RAN) battery, which evaluates visuospatial reading skills leveraging metrics addressing crowding, distractors, and voluntary attention orientation. The participant pool comprises 142 students (66 males, 76 females), including 46 non-native speakers (21 males, 25 females), representing a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds. The Top-RAN dataset encompasses performance, error, and self-correction metrics for each subtest and student, underscoring the significance of these factors in the process of reading acquisition. Analytical methods include dimensionality reduction, clustering, and classification algorithms, consolidated into a Python package to facilitate reproducible results. Our results indicate that visuospatial reading abilities vary according to the task and demonstrate a marked evolution over time, as seen in the progressive decrease in execution times, errors, and self-corrections. This pattern supports the hypothesis that the growth of oculomotor, attentional, and executive skills is primarily fostered by educational experiences and maturation. This investigation provides valuable insights into the dynamic nature of these skills during pivotal educational stages.

Two-stage reinforcement learning task predicts psychological traits

External sources of information influence human actions. However, psychological traits (PTs), considered internal variables, also play a crucial role in decision making. PTs are stable across time and contexts and define the set of behavioral repertoires that individuals express. Here, we explored how multiple metrics of adaptive behavior under uncertainty related to several PTs. Participants solved a reversal-learning task with volatile contingencies, from which we characterized a detailed behavioral profile based on their response sequences. We then tested the relationship between this multimetric behavioral profile and scores obtained from self-report psychological questionnaires. The PT measurements were based on the Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology (HiTOP) model. By using multiple linear regression models (MLRMs), we found that the learning curves predicted important differences in the PTs and task response times. We confirmed the significance of these relationships by using random permutations of the predictors of the MLRM. Therefore, the behavioral profile configurations predicted the PTs and served as a "fingerprint" to identify participants with a high certainty level. We discuss briefly how this characterization and approach could contribute to better nosological classifications.

Oculomotor deficits in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A systematic review and comprehensive meta-analysis

Atypical motor coordination and cognitive processes, such as response inhibition and working memory, have been extensively researched in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Oculomotor neural circuits overlap extensively with regions involved in motor planning and cognition, therefore studies of oculomotor function may offer unique insights into motor and cognitive control in ADHD. We performed a series of pairwise meta-analyses based on data from 26 oculomotor studies in ADHD to examine whether there were differences in performance on visually-guided saccade, gap, antisaccade, memory-guided, pursuit eye movements and fixation tasks. These analyses revealed oculomotor disturbances in ADHD, particularly for difficulties relating to saccade inhibition, memorizing visual target locations and initiating antisaccades. There was no evidence for pursuit eye movement disturbances or saccade dysmetria. Investigating oculomotor abnormalities in ADHD may provide insight into top-down cognitive control processes and motor control, and may serve as a promising biomarker in ADHD research and clinical practice.

Clustering of neuropsychological traits of preschoolers

Neuropsychological tests (targeting cognitive, linguistic, motor, and executive abilities) are grouped in neuropsychological domains that are thought to be stable through adulthood. However, this assumption does not always hold true, particularly during young children's early developmental phase. Here, we explored how the neuropsychological profile of typical Spanish-speaking preschoolers varied and consolidated with age. We recruited 643 monolingual Latin-American children from Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala, with ages spanning from 30 to 71 months of age, and applied a novel neuropsychological examination which combined a total of 52 tests covering five classical neuropsychological domains: receptive, expressive, attention/memory, processing, and executive functions. These tests' scores uncovered a correlational structure across neuropsychological functions that could not be explained by chance. Notably, these correlations' overall strength, but not their interdependence across domains, dramatically increased with age. Moreover, by applying conventional clustering techniques to classify the experimental data, we found a stable representation of two clusters of children with distinctive traits, with cultural factors contributing to this classification scheme. We also found that the tasks were well organized in a network of abilities, where nodes with highest highest interconnectedness were those that required multimodal processing. These results contribute to our understanding of children's 'normal' development and could help identify how failure in particular functions forecasts the emergence of neurodevelopmental disorders. Our analytic methods might become useful to characterize individual differences and improve educational practices and interventions.

Isomorphic decisional biases across perceptual tasks

Humans adjust their behavioral strategies to maximize rewards. However, in the laboratory, human decisional biases exist and persist in two alternative tasks, even when this behavior leads to a loss in utilities. Such biases constitute the tendency to choose one action over others and emerge from a combination of external and internal factors that are specific for each individual. Here, we explored the idea that internally-mediated decisional biases should stably occur and, hence, be reflected across multiple behavioral tasks. Our experimental results confirm this notion and illustrate how participants exhibited similar choice biases across days and tasks. Moreover, we show how side-choice behavior in a two alternative choice task served to identify participants, suggesting that individual traits could underlie these choice biases. The tasks and analytic tools developed for this study should become instrumental in exploring the interaction between internal and external factors that contribute to decisional biases. They could also serve to detect psychopathologies that involve aberrant levels of choice variability.

An Automated Water Task to Test Visual Discrimination Performance, Adaptive Strategies and Stereotyped Choices in Freely Moving Mice

We describe an automated training/testing system for adult mice that allows reliable quantification of visual discrimination capacities, adaptive swimming strategies, and stereotyped choices with minimal human intervention. The experimental apparatus consists of a hexagonal swimming pool with an internal decision zone leading to three interior arms with two software-controlled platforms inside of each arm. Each experimental trial consists in projecting a "positive" conditioned discriminative stimulus (SD) in one randomly chosen arm, whereas the other two arms project non-reinforced stimuli (the delta stimuli, SΔ). By employing a classical behavioral training schedule, the mice learn to swim toward the arm that displays the SD, because it predicts the presence of two elevated platforms located symmetrically to the left and right side of the projecting monitor. Separate behavioral components for discriminative and stereotyped choice behavior can be identified through this geometric arrangement. In addition, the projection in real-time of either static or dynamic visual stimuli allows the usage of training programs contingent on current behavioral performance. We validated the system by characterizing the visual acuity and contrast sensitivities in a group of trained mice. By employing pharmacological manipulations, we found that the mice required an intact functioning of the primary visual cortex (V1) to solve the hexagonal pool. Overall, the automated training system constitutes a reliable, rapid, and inexpensive method to quantify visual capacities of mice. It can be used to characterize visual and non-visual factors of choice behavior. It can also be combined with manipulations of visual experience and pharmacological micro-infusions to investigate integrated brain function and learning processes in adult mice over consecutive days.