Show me your eyes! The combined use of eye tracking and virtual reality applications for cognitive assessment
Pedro Joel Rosa, Pedro S. Gamito, Jorge Oliveira, Diogo Vieira De Morais, Matthew Pavlovic, Olivia Smyth · 2015
Attention and working memory are essential aspects of human cognitive abilities. When these capacities are impaired, virtual reality applications (VRAs) can be a tool to assess and rehabilitate. However, most VRAs use indirect manual reaction time measures to make inferences about visual attention processes. Since behavioral measures are quite indirect, eye tracking (ET) can offer a better alternative to probe more directly where and how attention is deployed. We propose two tasks with different levels of perceptual complexity for assessing visual attention and performance. Two comparative visual search tasks, as part of a set of cognitive tasks in the Systemic Lisbon Battery (SLB), a VRA designed to assess of cognitive impairments, were randomly presented to 39 healthy participants while the eye movements were continuously recorded. The total fixation duration, the number of visits in the areas of interest, along with the total execution time changed as a function of the overall score of cognitive ability. The present study demonstrates that the "spot the differences" tasks in SLB, combined with ET, are a reliable, sensitive and unobtrusive method to assess cognitive abilities in healthy individuals with a relevant potential use in clinical samples.