The authors present profiles of performance on a behavioral task (Visual Paired Comparison) using infrared eye tracking that could potentially be useful in predicting the onset of Alzheimer's Disease. Delay intervals of 2 sec and 2 min were used between the initial viewing of a picture and when the picture was displayed alongside a novel picture. Eye-tracking revealed that at the 2 second delay, 6 mild cognitively impaired patients (MCI), 15 matched control subjects (NC), and 4 neurological control subject's with Parkinson's Disease (PD) performed comparably, i.e., viewed the novel picture greater than 71% of the time. When the delay increased to 2 minutes, MCI patients viewed the novel picture only 53% of the time (p < .05), while NC and PD remained above 70%. These findings are consistent with the idea that the MCI patients did not remember well which picture was recently viewed. These findings demonstrate the usefulness of this task for assessing normal as well as impaired memory function.
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