Eye Movements in Neuropsychological Tasks

This chapter reviews how recording and analysis of eye movements has been applied to understanding cognitive functioning in patients. Measures derived from the performance of instructed eye movement tests such as the anti-saccade and memory-guided saccade tasks have been shown to be associated with cognitive test performance and the early stages of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Other research has taken an ecological approach and recorded the uninstructed pattern of saccades made by patients during performance of established neuropsychological tasks. Studies that have analysed the eye movement strategies used in a number of widely used tests are reviewed, including the Corsi Blocks, Tower of London, ‘CANTAB’ Spatial Working Memory and Brixton Spatial Anticipation test. The findings illustrate that eye movements are not purely in the service of vision, but support visuo-spatial working memory and forward action planning. Eye movement tests and measures also have potential for application in the assessment and diagnosis of neurological disease and cognitive impairment. Establishing large scale normative datasets in healthy older adults and use of machine learning multi-variate classifier algorithms may be key to further developing eye tracking applications in neuropsychological assessment