Chamorro Yaira, Treviño Mario, Matute Esmeralda
Laboratorio de Neuropsicología y Neurolingüística, Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico.
Laboratorio de Plasticidad Cortical y Aprendizaje Perceptual, Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico.
Front Psychol. 2017 Nov 20;8:2009. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02009. eCollection 2017.
Voluntary gaze control allows people to direct their attention toward selected targets while avoiding distractors. Failure in this ability could be related to dysfunctions in the neural circuits underlying executive functions. Interestingly, recent evidence suggests that factors such as years of schooling and literacy may positively influence goal-directed behavior and inhibitory control. However, we do not yet know whether these factors also have a significant impact on the inhibitory control of oculomotor responses. Using pro- and antisaccadic tasks to assess the behavioral responses of healthy adults, we tested the contribution of years of schooling and reading proficiency to their oculomotor control, while simultaneously analyzing the effects of other individual characteristics related to demographic, cognitive and motor profiles. This approach allowed us to test the hypothesis that schooling factors are closely related to oculomotor performance. Indeed, a regression analysis revealed important contributions of reading speed and intellectual functioning to the choices on both pro- and antisaccadic tasks, while years of schooling, age and block sequence emerged as important predictors of the kinematic properties of eye movements on antisaccadic tasks. Thus, our findings show that years of schooling and reading speed had a strong predictive influence on the oculomotor measures, although age and order of presentation also influenced saccadic performance, as previously reported. Unexpectedly, we found that an indirect measure of intellectual ability also proved to be a good predictor of the control of saccadic movements. The methods and findings of this study will be useful for identifying and breaking down the cognitive and educational components involved in assessing voluntary and automatic responses.
自主眼动控制使人们能够将注意力指向选定的目标，同时避开干扰物。这种能力的缺失可能与执行功能背后的神经回路功能障碍有关。有趣的是，最近的证据表明，受教育年限和读写能力等因素可能会对目标导向行为和抑制控制产生积极影响。然而，我们尚不清楚这些因素是否也会对眼球运动反应的抑制控制产生重大影响。我们使用正向和反向眼跳任务来评估健康成年人的行为反应，测试了受教育年限和阅读能力对其眼球运动控制的作用，同时分析了与人口统计学、认知和运动特征相关的其他个体特征的影响。这种方法使我们能够检验受教育因素与眼球运动表现密切相关的假设。事实上，回归分析显示阅读速度和智力功能对正向和反向眼跳任务中的选择有重要贡献，而受教育年限、年龄和组块顺序则是反向眼跳任务中眼球运动运动学特性的重要预测因素。因此，我们的研究结果表明，受教育年限和阅读速度对眼球运动测量有很强的预测影响，尽管年龄和呈现顺序也会影响眼跳表现，正如之前所报道的那样。出乎意料的是，我们发现智力能力的一项间接测量指标也被证明是眼跳运动控制的良好预测指标。本研究的方法和结果将有助于识别和分解评估自主和自动反应所涉及的认知和教育成分。
