Abstract
The aim of this study was to clarify the nature of visual processing deficits caused by cerebellar disorders. We studied the performance of two types of visual search (top-down visual scanning and bottom-up visual scanning) in 18 patients with pure cerebellar types of spinocerebellar degeneration (SCA6: 11; SCA31: 7). The gaze fixation position was recorded with an eye-tracking device while the subjects performed two visual search tasks in which they looked for a target Landolt figure among distractors. In the serial search task, the target was similar to the distractors and the subject had to search for the target by processing each item with top-down visual scanning. In the pop-out search task, the target and distractor were clearly discernible and the visual salience of the target allowed the subjects to detect it by bottom-up visual scanning. The saliency maps clearly showed that the serial search task required top-down visual attention and the pop-out search task required bottom-up visual attention. In the serial search task, the search time to detect the target was significantly longer in SCA patients than in normal subjects, whereas the search time in the pop-out search task was comparable between the two groups. These findings suggested that SCA patients cannot efficiently scan a target using a top-down attentional process, whereas scanning with a bottom-up attentional process is not affected. In the serial search task, the amplitude of saccades was significantly smaller in SCA patients than in normal subjects. The variability of saccade amplitude (saccadic dysmetria), number of re-fixations, and unstable fixation (nystagmus) were larger in SCA patients than in normal subjects, accounting for a substantial proportion of scattered fixations around the items. Saccadic dysmetria, re-fixation, and nystagmus may play important roles in the impaired top-down visual scanning in SCA, hampering precise visual processing of individual items.
Highlights
The cerebellum is intimately involved in coordinating skilled motor behavior, whereas impairment of the cerebellum is associated with cerebellar motor symptoms such as cerebellar ataxic movements, e.g. dysmetria
Using an eye-tracking device, we recently showed that at least some part of the visual processing impairment in patients with spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) may be accounted for by ‘dysmetria in oculomotor control,’ such as saccadic dysmetria and nystagmus, rather than dysmetria of cognition [19]
Gaze fixations were distributed over a larger area in SCA patients than in normal subjects
Summary
The cerebellum is intimately involved in coordinating skilled motor behavior, whereas impairment of the cerebellum is associated with cerebellar motor symptoms such as cerebellar ataxic movements, e.g. dysmetria. Disturbances of attention, executive functioning, and frontal lobelike behavioral and affective alterations have been observed after focal primary cerebellar damage, resulting in a fairly common picture of cognitive and affective disturbances [1]. These cognitive impairments are generally thought to be caused by the cerebellar connections with the cerebral cortex [2,3,4,5]. Since most of the cognitive processing in daily life involves visual processing, the present study addressed how visual processing is impaired in cerebellar disorders
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