Schedule of Events | Symposia

Investigating Differences in Eye Tracking Metrics Between Numeric and Alphanumeric Test Complexities in the Traill Making Test

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Bailey Uitz¹ (uitz.b@northeastern.edu), Ethan Wong¹, Isabella Frenzilli, Erin Lynch, Eugene Tunik, Mathew Yarossi; ¹Northeastern University

Tailoring interventions for neurological impairment relies on precise diagnosis of deficits across multiple domains. Existing clinical scales to assess cognitive-motor function typically offer limited performance metrics in a single domain. By digitizing these tools, it's possible to capture the spatial-temporal aspects of behavior, providing insight into domain-specific deficits. Furthermore, quantitative capture of eye-hand coordination can provide unparalleled insights about the interplay of the cognitive-visual-motor triad that is critical for complex behavior. With this aim, we developed a novel digitized TMT (dTMT) with integrated eye-tracking to allow for extraction of more in-depth outcome measures, necessary for multi-domain assessment. The dTMT shows strong criterion validity in young healthy individuals in comparison to the original paper TMT. Healthy young participants (N=21) completed numeric (1-2-3-4...) and alphanumeric (1-A-2-B...) versions of the eye tracking-integrated dTMT. Hand path, gaze path, and spatial and temporal distribution of fixation targets relative to hand target were measured to assess differences in the cognitive resources required between test complexities. In a comparison of the alphanumeric and the numeric tasks there was a significant (p<0.001) increase in the number of fixations and an increase (p<0.001) in fixations on previously achieved targets. These results indicate that greater cognitive resources are required for the alphanumeric test characterized by more complex spatial planning (increased number of fixations), less attention to the peripheral visual field, and a greater strain on working memory (increased re-fixations). This work establishes the utilization of an eye-tracking integrated dTMT for the detection of individualized domain-specific deficits in neurologically impaired populations.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other