Deena Ebaid

The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health · Vascular Neurodegeneration

Objectives Cognitive and mood dysfunction are major contributors to post-stroke disability. The longer-term trajectories of mood and cognition post-stroke remain unclear, as do which cognitive domains decline, improve, or remain stable after stroke, and in which patients. We aimed to characterize the cognitive trajectories of mild ischemic stroke s...

Background Admission stroke severity is an important clinical predictor of stroke outcomes. Pre-stroke physical activity (PA) contributes to stroke prevention and may also be associated with reduced stroke severity. Summarising the evidence to-date will inform strategies to reduce burden after stroke. Aims To summarise the published evidence for th...

Background: Migraine is recognized as a neurological condition that is often associated with comorbid psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and/or panic disorder. Though some studies have demonstrated the link between migraine and anxiety disorders, there are no systematic reviews that have been published in this area t...

Oculomotor functions are established surrogate measures of visual attention shifting and rate of information processing, however, the temporal characteristics of saccades and fixations have seldom been compared in healthy educated samples of younger and older adults. Thus, the current study aimed to compare duration of eye movement components in yo...

The underlying premise of current theories of cognitive decline with age tend to be primarily cognitive or biological explanations, with relatively few theories adequately integrating both aspects. Though literature has also emphasized the importance of several factors that contribute to cognitive aging including: (a) decline in sensory abilities;...

Although the visual system is reported to undergo profound changes across the lifespan, oculomotor function during measures of perceptual speed have seldom been compared in samples of healthy, educated, young and older adults. Thus, the current study aimed to examine and correlate patterns of eye movements and consequent shifts in attention during...

Decline in information processing with age is well-documented in the scientific literature. However, some discrepancy remains in relation to which cognitive domains are most susceptible to the aging process and which may remain intact. Furthermore, information processing has not been investigated nor considered as a function of affect, familiarity...

Lecture outline - Insight into the neurocognitive changes that occur across the healthy lifespan are of vital importance particularly in relation to the application of these findings to clinical populations. Cognitive processing across the lifespan has received significant attention in the neuroscientific literature, however, disparity and gaps i...

The human visual system is essential for guiding most behaviour and is reported to undergo profound changes across the lifespan. Oculomotor functions such as eye gaze patterns including fixations and saccadic eye movements are robust and non-invasive measures of cognitive function and provide extensive insight into higher order cognitive abilities....

Cognitive abilities are often reported to decline across the lifespan, particularly when assessed with working memory (WM) measures such as the auditory backward digit span and complex N-back tasks. However, some debate still exists regarding which aspects of cognition are most susceptible to the aging process and which may remain intact. Additiona...

Time estimation, though a complex psychological dimension is particularly neglected in the traditional study of working memory and is often studied in isolation. It is also particularly neglected in the aging literature. Minimal literature on retrospective time estimation in the seconds-minute range in healthy older adults compared to younger adult...

Although age related declines in cognitive functions are consistently reported, there is little direct research relating to rate of visual information processing for particular cognitive activities when memory and/or motor contributions are minimized in older populations. Thus, the current study investigated changes in rate of processing in 67 youn...

Cognitive processing speed is commonly reported to decline with advanced age and is often assumed to be the core issue responsible for deficits in performance on complex cognitive tasks in aging populations. However, there is no clear, generic definition nor operationalization of the term processing speed raising the issue of whether traditional me...

Rate of visual processing (VP) and eye movements were only slower in older adults when naming objects, as opposed to letters and numbers which is likely related to familiarity and over learning. Rate of VP and cognitive reaction time correlate for older adults but not younger groups especially on more complex tasks (i.e., change detection).

Traditional neuropsychological measurement of cognitive processing speed with tasks such as the Symbol Search and Coding subsets of the WAIS-IV, consistently show decline with advancing age. This is potentially problematic with populations where deficits in motor performance are expected, i.e., in aging or stroke populations. Thus, the aim of the c...

Cognitive decline across the lifespan is commonly documented in terms of motor reaction times though the unique contribution that rate of visual information processing (VIP) makes to such decline has seldom been explored. Thus, in the current study, cognitive reaction times (CRT) were measured using two tasks—Change Detection (CD) and Inspection Ti...

This poster highlights age related changes in cognitive reaction time (CRT) as measured with psychophysical Inspection Time and Change Detection tasks. This poster also highlights the correlation between rate of Visual Information Processing (VIP) with performance on the cognitive reaction time measures.