Eye Tracking During a Visual Paired Comparison Task as a Predictor of Early Dementia

Abstract

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.

Cognitive evaluation for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease based on Turing Test and Virtual Environments

“…As a result, most of the studies revealed an increment of saccades, defects in fixations and slow pursuit movements. Nevertheless, as suggested by Pereira et al in [33,34], these studies fail to consider attentional impairments as a multi-domain concept and their results still need to be corroborated by future studies.…”

“…the evaluation of patients visual memory [33,34]. Pereira, et al [33] analysed different methods that use eye-movement to determine visual impairments in Alzheimer patients.…”

On the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease from multimodal signals: A survey

“…They used the visual paired comparison task, which consists on identifying the eye movement pattern of the patients while introducing new visual stimulus. It has been seen that control patients spend 70% of the time looking at the new stimulus whereas MCI patients spend the same time looking at the old and new pictures, suggesting that they are not familiarized with anyone of them [229]. They used these and other eye dynamics' features and an SVM classifier, achieving an accuracy of 86.9% distinguishing between MCI and control patients.…”

“…Moreover, it is not clear if MCI patients also show signs of these abnormalities because while some refuse this fact [224], others have found some evidences [220,225]. Crutcher et al [229] have also found that some MCI preferred the new images the same as the control patients, demonstrating the variability between patients' patterns. Consequently, further research is needed to verify if they might be used both as AD biomarkers and as predictors in the early stages.…”

Development of a head-mounted, eye-tracking system for dogs

“…It also has the potential to provide a measure of visual acuity both between dog breeds and in specific individuals. As allocation of visual attention can be used to assess cognitive function (Crutcher et al, 2009), the system could also be applied to the identification of cognitive changes and degeneration.…”