To identify these inhibition disorders that occur in the elderly, British researchers have developed an eye movement test.
When a person ages, many unpleasant symptoms appear: taste, touch and smell are found for example altered as well as the inhibitory control or inhibition capacity. The latter refers to a series of mechanisms that allow the suppression of inappropriate cognitions and actions. It is related to social competence and emotional regulation. Thus, the older we get, the more difficult it is for us to prevent ourselves from carrying out an action or to erase from our working memory content that is not relevant to the task at hand.
Therefore, many older people tend to do things that seem completely inappropriate. This disorder is also present in patients with schizophrenia, attention and hyperactivity disorder, or some form of Parkinson’s. Patients may become nervous, distracted or suffer from unwanted thoughts. To spot these inhibition disorders, researchers in Liverpool have developed an eye movement test. The results of their study were published on January 9 in the journal PeerJ.
As part of their research, researchers from the Department of Eye and Vision Sciences at the University of Liverpool (UK) recruited two different age groups, one from 19 to 27 years old and the another from 50 to 72 years old. They showed them a dot in the center of a computer screen and then, when the latter disappeared, a second one that appeared on the left or on the right. Scientists measured eye movements using an infrared eye tracker.
“Studying inhibitory control in a range of important diseases”
Result: the older participants were more likely to look at the dot when it appeared and not when it transformed and were slower to identify it.
“We are designed to react to things that appear in our visual world. It’s something we do automatically. However, we also have the ability to stop ourselves from reacting and this prevents us from becoming slaves to our sensory environment”, explains Dr. Paul Knox who conducted the study.
“This new test allows us to precisely measure inhibitory behavior. Clearly, older participants found it harder to inhibit their actions, even after taking into account the general slowdown that occurs with aging,” he continues. And to conclude: “This confirms that a decrease in inhibitory control is part of normal aging. We are experimenting to refine the test and then hope to use it to study inhibitory control in a range of important diseases.”
Eye tests are regularly used by researchers to identify biomarkers of behavioral disorders. In 2017, researchers at the University of Rochester (United States) succeeded in detecting autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in some of those affected by observing rapid eye movements. More recently, scientists from the University of Dartmouth (United States) observed that individuals suffering from autism are slower to move from one image to another. These results offer new hope for better diagnosis of the disease.
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