A bodysuit that heats or cools a patient, combined with painless measurements of eye movements, is providing multiple sclerosis researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center with a new tool to study the mysterious link between body temperature and severity of MS symptoms.

A pair of Beckman Institute researchers has discovered that by directing the eye movements of test subjects they were able to affect the participants’ ability to solve a problem, demonstrating that eye movement is not just a function of cognition but can actually affect our cognitive processes.

Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience, and Stephen Macknik, Ph.D., director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, are featured on the cover of the August issue of Scientific American for their research on fixational eye movements.

Driving a vehicle requires coordination of horizontal eye movements and steering. A research abstract that will be presented Monday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS), finds that even a single night of sleep deprivation can impact a person's ability to coordinate eye movements with steering.