The way people with Parkinson’s disease make use of their eyes to complete simple tasks in both the real world and working at computers is being investigated by neuroscientists and the findings could help in early diagnosis and improve their life’s quality.
Neuroscientists at the University of Lincoln have been investigating markers specific to Parkinson’s, including jerky movements of the eyes – termed as “Multi-stepping”
With a specialist software to monitor small but significant eye movements when sitting at a computer, they found that people with Parkinson’s are more easily distracted and have disorganized eye movements unlike normal people during problem solving and memory tasks.
Diagnosis:
Researchers are using Portable eye trackers to examine natural eye movements in real world tasks to improvise the understanding on how the condition affects day-to-day life.
Parkinson’s disease has no known etiology and there is no cure till date. Symptoms are controlled with the help of drug combinations and occasionally surgery. People with this condition do not produce enough of the chemical dopamine because nerve cells in their brain have died. In the absence of dopamine motor functions become slower and the loss of nerve cells in the brain causes the symptoms of Parkinson’s to appear.
Everyday tasks require visual skills to link between what we see and where we look with our eyes, hence we could switch between different tasks, like preparing a cup of tea, reading paper and answering telephone. Visual skills are also important to learn new things such as learning a new recipe or a new game.
Due to changes in the way the brain works in a person with Parkinson’s, they face problems learning new visuo-spatial tasks over and above the obvious difficulties- for example- shaking- the condition causes with movement.
The study;
Participants with and without Parkinson’s were asked to perform a computerized eye movement task where they were give a series of rules to be followed when presented with a stimulus. The eye tracker equipment then monitored how closely they were able to follow the rule and how much their eyes moved.
The study showed that people with the disease condition were slower to learn a new instruction compared with participants without the disease. This suggests that their brain circuits and chemical changes affect their visual capacity. It also studies how portable devices work to monitor how the eyes work in the real world.