Eye movement behavior analyses for studying cognitive performance and conversion to pathologies

Abstract

The interest of linking eye movement and reading has shown an exponential growth in the last decades. Additionally, the technology for tracking gaze position has advanced considerably and has become widely available for its use. Reading is a feedback process that requires the integration of different cognitive systems, and is an ideal field for exploring the relationships between eye movements and top-down processes. Several of the associated cognitive processes such as working memory and semantic memory are known to be relevant when reading sentences. For example, during reading high-predictable sentences the upcoming word predictability facilitates word processing in healthy readers. In the present chapter, we show the effect of contextual word predictability on the eye-movement behavior in patients with mild cognitive impairment due to dementia and to neuropsychiatric pathologies (i.e., Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia respectively) in comparison with control groups of similar ages and education. The differences in the pattern are clearly presented. Our results show that it is possible to develop a new, objective, noninvasive, and economical technique to evaluate mild cognitive impairments that could help in the early and proper diagnosis of such pathologies.