MCI EVALUATION THROUGH EYE MOVEMENT'S ANALYSIS

M. SCHUMACHER; D. OROZCO; O. AGAMENNONI; G. FERNÁNDEZ; L. CASTRO

Bilbao

Encuentro; 47th European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, EBBS Meeting 2017; 2017

European Brain and Behaviour Society

Objectives: Evaluate the relationships between eye movement during reading and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI).Purpose: To develop a technique for accurate, objective, precise, non-invasive and economic MCI evaluation.Methods: We analyzed the eye movement behavior during reading Spanish regular and highly-predictable sentences using an eyetracker.The control group consisted of 35 elderly adults (24 Female and 11 Male), mean 70 years old (SD=6.2), with no known neurological and psychiatric disease and no evidence of cognitive decline or impairment in daily activities. The AD group; consisted of 22 Females, 13 Males; mean 68 years old (SD=6.4). The diagnosis of probable AD were based on DSM-IV. All AD patients underwent a detailed clinical history, physical/neurological examination and thyroid function test. Patients were excluded if they suffered from any medical conditions that could interfere with, their cognitive decline.Using the eye movement information data and linear mixed models we analyzed the effects of previous words properties (predictability, length, frequency) in the gaze and fixation duration. Results: In Controls, changes in predictability significantly affected fixation duration along the sentence; noteworthy, these changes did not affect fixation durations in AD patients (t-value>3.5) [See reference].Contextual-word predictability, whose processing require memory retrieval, only affected reading behavior in healthy subjects. In AD, this loss might reveal impairments in brain areas such as those corresponding to working memory and memory retrieval. Conclusions: Our study provides a test-bed for initial research on cognitive impairments linked to semantic, working and retrieval memory deficiencies. We were able to prove that deficits in the capacity for processing complex information are linked to memory guided eye movements. Early detection and monitoring opportunities in AD patients will be improved by this test. Furthermore, the results obtained with this novel methodology could become in time a simple marker for early disease detection.