Summary
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.
Keywords
Eye movements - attention - memory - virtual reality - comparative visual search task
