IIIE   20352
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN INGENIERIA ELECTRICA "ALFREDO DESAGES"
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
DIAGNOSIS OF MILD ALZHEIMER DISEASE THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF EYE MOVEMENTS DURING READING
Autor/es:
FERNÁNDEZ GERARDO ABEL; CASTRO LILIANA; SCHUMACHER MARCELA; AGAMENNONI OSVALDO
Revista:
JOURNAL OF INTEGRATIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Editorial:
IMPERIAL COLLEGE PRESS
Referencias:
Lugar: London; Año: 2015 vol. 14 p. 1 - 13
ISSN:
0219-6352
Resumen:
Reading requires the integration of several central cognitive subsystems, ranging from attention and oculomotor control to word identification and language comprehension. Reading saccades and fixations contain information that can be correlated with word properties. When reading a sentence, the brain must decide where to direct the next saccade according to what has been read up to the actual ¯xation. In this process, the retrieval memory brings information about the current word features and attributes into working memory. According to this information, the prefrontal cortex predicts and triggers the next saccade. The frequency and cloze predictability of the fixated word, the preceding words and the upcoming ones affect when and where the eyes will move next. In this paper we present a diagnostic technique for early stage cognitive impairment detection by analyzing eye movements during reading proverbs. We performed a case-control study involving 20 patients with probable Alzheimer´s disease and 40 age-matched, healthy control patients. The measurements were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models, revealing that eye movement behavior while reading can provide valuable information about whether a person is cognitively impaired. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using word-based properties, proverbs and linear mixed-effect models for identifying cognitive abnormalities.