Eye movement analysis and cognitive assessment: the use of comparative visual search tasks in a non-immersive vr application

• Autor(a) principal: Rosa, P.
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Gamito, P., Oliveira, J., Morais, D., Pavlovic, M., Smyth, O., Maia, I., Gomes, T.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/15696
• topic: Eye movements; Attention; Memory; Virtual reality; Comparative visual search task

Background: An adequate behavioral response depends on attentional and mnesic processes. When these basic cognitive functions are impaired, the use of non-immersive Virtual Reality Applications (VRAs) can be a reliable technique for assessing the level of impairment. However, most non-immersive VRAs use indirect measures to make inferences about visual attention and mnesic processes (e.g., time to task completion, error rate). Objectives: To examine whether the eye movement analysis through eye tracking (ET) can be a reliable method to probe more effectively where and how attention is deployed and how it is linked with visual working memory during comparative visual search tasks (CVSTs) in non-immersive VRAs. Methods: The eye movements of 50 healthy participants were continuously recorded while CVSTs, selected from a set of cognitive tasks in the Systemic Lisbon Battery (SLB). Then a VRA designed to assess of cognitive impairments were randomly presented. Results: The total fixation duration, the number of visits in the areas of interest and in the interstimulus space, along with the total execution time was significantly different as a function of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores. Conclusions: The present study demonstrates that CVSTs in SLB, when combined with ET, can be a reliable and unobtrusive method for assessing cognitive abilities in healthy individuals, opening it to potential use in clinical samples.