Screening in delirium: A pilot study of two screening tools, the Simple Query for Easy Evaluation of Consciousness and Simple Question in Delirium.

AIM: Delirium is poorly recognised and inadequately treated in medical settings. This research aimed to determine the psychometric properties of a newly developed tool, SQeeC against another emergent instrument, SQiD, in the screening of delirium. METHODS: The SQeeC was administered to 100 patients and SQiD administered to their informants in the general medical wards of a General Hospital. Data were compared with the reference standard geriatric consultant assessment of delirium. RESULTS: Compared with the reference standard, the SQeeC was found to have a sensitivity of 83% (95% CI 52-98%) and a specificity of 81% (95% CI 72-89%) with a negative predictive value of 97% (95% CI 90-100%) while the SQiD was found to have a sensitivity of 77% (95% CI 56-91%), a specificity of 51% (95% CI 37-64%) and a negative predictive value of 83% (95% CI 66-93%). CONCLUSION: The SQeeC and SQiD are simple and time efficient screening tools with encouraging psychometric properties.

Visual and tactile integration in action comprehension and execution.

Humans rely on the integration of information from multiple sensory modalities to interact successfully with their environment. In the present series of studies, we investigated how the visuomotor system integrates congruent and incongruent visual and tactile sensory inputs for goal-directed action comprehension and execution. Specifically, we investigated whether orienting of attention towards vision, touch, or both vision and touch enhances the impact of one modality over another. In Experiment 1 participants were presented with visual (on a computer monitor) and/or tactile (in unseen left hand) sensory inputs of an action, and made button-press responses to categorize it as 'wide' or 'narrow'. Responses were significantly faster when attending to vision compared with touch, and faster in fully congruent compared with grasp congruent and incongruent conditions. Thus, both vision and touch are significant in action comprehension, but visual inputs are in general more influential than tactile inputs. Moreover, responses to wide grasp actions were significantly faster than to narrow-grasp actions. In Experiment 2 the same task was performed but the participants made reach-to-grasp movements, recorded with ProReflex motion capture system. Although actions to wide objects produced wider peak grasp overall than to a narrow object, in contrast to action comprehension, there was no systematic effect of attended modality or tactile input in action execution. We speculate that action comprehension and execution utilize visual and tactile inputs differentially.