Tourette’s disorder

a tic disorder characterized by many motor tics and one or more vocal tics, such as grunts, yelps, barks, sniffs, or (rarely) coprolalia. The tics occur many times a day for more than a year, during which time any period free of tics is never longer than 3 months. The age of onset for the disorder is before 18 years; in most cases, it starts during childhood or early adolescence. Also called Gilles de la Tourette’s syndrome. [first described in 1885 by Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904), French physician]

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Psychology term of the day

January 26th 2025

congenital oculomotor apraxia

a condition, present at birth, in which a child is unable to fixate objects normally (see oculomotor apraxia). It is characterized by the absence of saccades and smooth-pursuit eye movements in the horizontal plane, but vertical eye movements are preserved: Children with this condition are often mistakenly thought to be blind. Between the ages of 4 and 6 months, they develop thrusting, horizontal head movements, sometimes blinking prominently or rubbing their eyelids when they attempt to change fixation. The cause of congenital oculomotor apraxia is unknown, but there is usually an improvement with age.