Date of Completion

2024

Document Type

Honors College Thesis

Department

Rehabilitation and Movement Science

Thesis Type

Honors College

First Advisor

Sambit Mohapatra

Keywords

visual perception oculomotor function eye tracking

Abstract

BACKGROUND: As eye tracking devices improve and are used in research, they elucidate the impacts of visual variables and neurological disease on the visual perception. Visual symptoms have been linked to both structural and functional neurological diseases, including traumatic brain injury (TBI), Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. These visual perceptual impacts indicate possible diagnostic criteria to identify and treat neurological disease. PURPOSE: This preliminary methodological study focused on data collection to investigate the uses of eye tracking and create a potential experimental design for future patient-based studies. The goal was to investigate the impact of target shape, animation, location, and background color on visual perception, as measured by fixation duration and number of fixations. METHODS: Four healthy sample participants were recruited and performed two eye tracking trials with randomized stimulus sets. Each stimulus set included four shades of background colors, from white to dark grey, two dynamic and two static targets, four target locations, in each quadrant of the screen, and four simple target shapes. RESULTS: The fixation counts and durations showed expected trends for background color, with more fixations the darker the background color due to longer processing time. Similarly, the animations showed more fixations for static as compared to dynamic stimuli due to ease of visual perception. The shape and location, however, showed unexpected effects with a decrease in fixations for the plus and star as compared to the circle and diamond, and decreased fixations in the top two quadrants as compared to the bottom two quadrants.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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