Formal and informal care utilisation amongst elderly persons with visual impairment.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the determinants of formal and informal care utilisation amongst persons with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). DESIGN: Cross-sectional hospital-based study. SETTING: Hospital eye clinic in Northern Ireland. PARTICIPANTS: 284 persons aged >or=50 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Participants were questioned about their care, living arrangements, eyesight-related ability to self-care, and eyesight-related need to be more careful whilst undertaking everyday tasks. RESULTS: The percentage of older persons receiving formal and informal care rose with the level of visual impairment. 34.9% and 37.3% of those with no visual impairment received formal and informal care, respectively, compared with 51.6% and 69.9% of those with moderate visual impairment and 55.6% and 88.9% of those with severe visual impairment. Three factors (age, best corrected distance visual acuity in the better eye and living alone) were significant predictors (p

Generalisation between opposing visuomotor rotations when each is associated with visual targets and movements of different amplitude

Previous studies have attempted to identify sources of contextual information which can facilitate dual adaptation to two variants of a novel environment, which are normally prone to interference. The type of contextual information previously used can be grouped into two broad categories: that which is arbitrary to the motor system, such as a colour cue, and that which is based on an internal property of the motor system, such as a change in movement effector. The experiments reported here examined whether associating visuomotor rotations to visual targets and movements of different amplitude would serve as an appropriate source of contextual information to enable dual adaptation. The results indicated that visual target and movement amplitude is not a suitable source of contextual information to enable dual adaptation in our task. Interference was observed in groups who were exposed to opposing visuomotor rotations, or a visuomotor rotation and no rotation, both when the onset of the visuomotor rotations was sudden, or occurred gradually over the course of training. Furthermore, the pattern of interference indicated that the inability to dual adapt was a result of the generalisation of learning between the two visuomotor mappings associated with each of the visual target and movement amplitudes. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The contribution of visual feedback to visuomotor adaptation: How much and when?

We investigated the role of visual feedback in adapting to novel visuomotor environments. Participants produced isometric elbow torques to move a cursor towards visual targets. Following trials with no rotation, participants adapted to a 60 degrees rotation of the visual feedback before returning to the non-rotated condition. Participants received continuous visual feedback (CF) of cursor position during task execution or post-trial visual feedback (PF). With training, reductions of the angular deviations of the cursor path occurred to a similar extent and at a similar rate for CF and PF groups. However, upon re-exposure to the non-rotated environment only CF participants exhibited post-training aftereffects, manifested as increased angular deviation of the cursor path, with respect to the pre-rotation trials. These aftereffects occurred despite colour cues permitting identification of the change in environment. The results show that concurrent feedback permits automatic recalibration of the visuomotor mapping while post-trial feedback permits performance improvement via a cognitive strategy. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Visual feedback alters the variations in corticospinal excitability that arise from rhythmic movements of the opposite limb

Augmented visual feedback can have a profound bearing on the stability of bimanual coordination. Indeed, this has been used to render tractable the study of patterns of coordination that cannot otherwise be produced in a stable fashion. In previous investigations (Carson et al. 1999), we have shown that rhythmic movements, brought about by the contraction of muscles on one side of the body, lead to phase-locked changes in the excitability of homologous motor pathways of the opposite limb. The present study was conducted to assess whether these changes are influenced by the presence of visual feedback of the moving limb. Eight participants performed rhythmic flexion-extension movements of the left wrist to the beat of a metronome (1.5 Hz). In 50% of trials, visual feedback of wrist displacement was provided in relation to a target amplitude, defined by the mean movement amplitude generated during the immediately preceding no feedback trial. Motor potentials (MEPs) were evoked in the quiescent muscles of the right limb by magnetic stimulation of the left motor cortex. Consistent with our previous observations, MEP amplitudes were modulated during the movement cycle of the opposite limb. The extent of this modulation was, however, smaller in the presence of visual feedback of the moving limb (FCR omega(2) =0.41; ECR omega(2)=0.29) than in trials in which there was no visual feedback (FCR omega(2)=0.51; ECR omega(2)=0.48). In addition, the relationship between the level of FCR activation and the excitability of the homologous corticospinal pathway of the opposite limb was sensitive to the vision condition; the degree of correlation between the two variables was larger when there was no visual feedback of the moving limb. The results of the present study support the view that increases in the stability of bimanual coordination brought about by augmented feedback may be mediated by changes in the crossed modulation of excitability in homologous motor pathways.

The hierarchy of directional interactions in visual motion processing

It is well known that context influences our perception of visual motion direction. For example, spatial and temporal context manipulations can be used to induce two well-known motion illusions: direction repulsion and the direction after-effect (DAE). Both result in inaccurate perception of direction when a moving pattern is either superimposed on (direction repulsion), or presented following adaptation to (DAE), another pattern moving in a different direction. Remarkable similarities in tuning characteristics suggest that common processes underlie the two illusions. What is not clear, however, is whether the processes driving the two illusions are expressions of the same or different neural substrates. Here we report two experiments demonstrating that direction repulsion and the DAE are, in fact, expressions of different neural substrates. Our strategy was to use each of the illusions to create a distorted perceptual representation upon which the mechanisms generating the other illusion could potentially operate. We found that the processes mediating direction repulsion did indeed access the distorted perceptual representation induced by the DAE. Conversely, the DAE was unaffected by direction repulsion. Thus parallels in perceptual phenomenology do not necessarily imply common neural substrates. Our results also demonstrate that the neural processes driving the DAE occur at an earlier stage of motion processing than those underlying direction repulsion.

Hidden Conditional Random Fields for Visual Speech Recognition

In this paper we present the application of Hidden Conditional Random Fields (HCRFs) to modelling speech for visual speech recognition. HCRFs may be easily adapted to model long range dependencies across an observation sequence. As a result visual word recognition performance can be improved as the model is able to take more of a contextual approach to generating state sequences. Results are presented from a speaker-dependent, isolated digit, visual speech recognition task using comparisons with a baseline HMM system. We firstly illustrate that word recognition rates on clean video using HCRFs can be improved by increasing the number of past and future observations being taken into account by each state. Secondly we compare model performances using various levels of video compression on the test set. As far as we are aware this is the first attempted use of HCRFs for visual speech recognition.

Using time-to-contact information to assess potential collision modulates both visual and temporal prediction networks

Accurate estimates of the time-to-contact (TTC) of approaching objects are crucial for survival. We used an ecologically valid driving simulation to compare and contrast the neural substrates of egocentric (head-on approach) and allocentric (lateral approach) TTC tasks in a fully factorial, event-related fMRI design. Compared to colour control tasks, both egocentric and allocentric TTC tasks activated left ventral premotor cortex/frontal operculum and inferior parietal cortex, the same areas that have previously been implicated in temporal attentional orienting. Despite differences in visual and cognitive demands, both TTC and temporal orienting paradigms encourage the use of temporally predictive information to guide behaviour, suggesting these areas may form a core network for temporal prediction. We also demonstrated that the temporal derivative of the perceptual index tau (tau-dot) held predictive value for making collision judgements and varied inversely with activity in primary visual cortex (V1). Specifically, V1 activity increased with the increasing likelihood of reporting a collision, suggesting top-down attentional modulation of early visual processing areas as a function of subjective collision. Finally, egocentric viewpoints provoked a response bias for reporting collisions, rather than no-collisions, reflecting increased caution for head-on approaches. Associated increases in SMA activity suggest motor preparation mechanisms were engaged, despite the perceptual nature of the task.