© 2015 The Authors, Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of College of Optometrists. Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics 36 (2016) 60–68 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Purpose: A recent randomised controlled trial indicated that providing long-term multifocal wearers with a pair of distance single-vision spectacles for use outside the home reduced falls risk in active older people. However, it also found that participants disliked continually switching between using two pairs of glasses and adherence to the intervention was poor. In this study we determined whether intermediate addition multifocals (which could be worn most of the time inside and outside the home and thus avoid continual switching) could provide similar gait safety on stairs to distance single vision spectacles whilst also providing adequate ‘short-term’ reading and near vision. Methods: Fourteen healthy long-term multifocal wearers completed stair ascent and descent trials over a 3-step staircase wearing intermediate and full addition bifocals and progression-addition lenses (PALs) and single-vision distance spectacles. Gait safety/caution was assessed using foot clearance measurements (toe on ascent, heel on descent) over the step edges and ascent and descent duration. Binocular near visual acuity, critical print size and reading speed were measured using Bailey-Lovie near charts and MNRead charts at 40 cm. Results: Gait safety/caution measures were worse with full addition bifocals and PALs compared to intermediate bifocals and PALs. The intermediate PALs provided similar gait ascent/descent measures to those with distance single- vision spectacles. The intermediate addition PALs also provided good reading ability: Near word acuity and MNRead critical print size were better with the intermediate addition PALs than with the single-vision lenses (p < 0.0001), with a mean near visual acuity of 0.24 0.13 logMAR (~N5.5) which is satisfactory for most near vision tasks when performed for a short period of time. Conclusions: The better ability to ‘spot read’ with the intermediate addition PALs compared to single-vision spectacles suggests that elderly individuals might better comply with the use of intermediate addition PALs outside the home. A lack of difference in gait parameters for the intermediate addition PALs compared to distance single-vision spectacles suggests they could be usefully used to help prevent falls in older well-adapted full addition PAL wearers. A randomised controlled trial to investigate the usefulness of intermediate multifocals in preventing falls seems warranted.
We are currently running a survey on people’s attitudes towards neuromarketing and related topics. We hope that you will all take this survey, as well as shard this link to as many people as you like. We hope to get as many people’s opinion as possible, and report the results through appropriate channels (i.e. journal paper, Master’s paper, and online here)
We would like to invite you to take part to this survey. Your answers will help to gather information about the perceptions and thoughts about the use of brain science methods in non-medical settings.
Any information that you provide will be confidential. All participants will be anonymous such that no personal information concerning you or your company will be made public either during, or after the completion and release of this study. The questionnaire should take about 10 minutes of your time. If you wish to receive a summary of the results (that you can pass on to your home company) please indicate at the end of this questionnaire and include your e-mail address. We will not use this e-mail for other purposes than for sending you the summary.
My name is Matteo Bellisario, and I am completing my final report for my Master Degree in Strategic Market Creation at the Copenhagen Business School, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
My academic supervisor for this research is Dr. Thomas Z. Ramsøy, head of the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School and Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance at Copenhagen University Hospital.
The results will be part of my Master Thesis, and may, if suitable, be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
I just love this title: Independence in ROI analysis: where is the voodoo? by Russel Poldrack and Jeanette Mumford. Lately, there has been much fuzz about so-called voodoo correlations in social neuroscience, and questions have been raised about the legitimacy of the claims put forward by Vul et al. (PDF of in press manuscript) and see criticism from Tania Singer and other colleagues here (PDF). Crucial to the criticism by Vul et al. is that the correlations between behavioural/social data and brain activation data show a correlation level that is highly improbable, or as Vul et al. put it:
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition have drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained.
We outline the problem of non-independence, and use a previously published dataset to examine the effects of non-independence. These analyses show that very strong correlations (exceeding 0.8) can occur even when the ROI is completely independent of the data being analyzed, suggesting that the claims of Vul et al. regarding the implausibility of these high correlations are incorrect.
I am not going to give you the details of the whole voodoo story here, since it has been covered nicely in the blogosphere. But what is interesting is that this discussion demonstrates just how easy it is to get pre-publication media and blogosphere coverage for researchers criticising brain research, much in the same vein as we saw in the case of criticism of neuroeconomics by Gul and Pesendorfer’s neo-conservative “A case agains mindless economics” (PDF), long before the article actually appeared… I guess in the end that as neuroscience and neuroimaging in particular becomes even more popular, it will always have the extremists of either side, saying either that it shows nothing/too much/fake information, or the wholesale version that lets people get away with anything, as long as they point to a brain…
I just love the way that YouTube is developing these days. If you just spend some time searching this wonderful site, you can get access to so many different teaching resources for psychology, neuroscience and philosophy that you could ever dream of. Seeing an interview with the younger Michael Gazzaniga speaking about the callosotomy procedure, BF Skinner speaking, even an item on Pavlov, just just blows my mind.
Or how about giving a demo of how patients with unilateral neglect actually behave (I’ve seen this many time when I was working clinically, but it’s like “what are you doing?”)
We highly recommend this interesting conference, and please note that the deadline for registration is tomorrow (!!!). So get this out to all and everybody, and see to that you register. Sounds like a good spot, too, for holding a conference 😀
In the past two decades, the field of Neuroscience has made significant progress in understanding the human brain. Many expect that this research will make further strides over the next decade. And many suggest that this knowledge could have a profound impact on the future of our legal system and legal practice. There has been much speculation over whether developments in neuroscience will overturn legal paradigms (e.g., by shattering the concept of free will). This conference will sidestep such speculations to address empirical evidence and current research on the likely impacts of neuroscience on legal practice, with a specific focus on European legal systems.
I just found this through mindhacks, and thought it was nice how well this illustrates the amazement one can get from witnessing neurological injury and disease. Through my early clinical practices, I’ve seen several kinds of unilateral neglect, blindsight, amnesias, aphasias, weird dementias (Wernicke-Korsakoff, fronto-polar, Parkinson Plus), and youtube may be the place to find good illustrations of this to the general public.
Antoine Bechara, the inventer of the Iowa Gambling Task, and together with Antonio Damasio the architect of the “somatic marker hypothesis” is visiting the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School at the moment. Here he is explaining to Thomas the role of gut feelings in making a decision to drink the bad CBS coffee or not.