Investigating Attentional Allocation With Eye Tracking During Category Learning in People With Aphasia

In this study, no differences were observed between individuals with aphasia and control participants on behavioral measures of accuracy and response time, though accuracies overall were lower than those of prior studies examining this task in young adults. Eye gaze data demonstrated that over the course of training, controls and individuals with aphasia learned to reduce the number of looks to the feature of lowest diagnosticity, suggestive of optimized attentional allocation. Eye gaze patterns, however, did not show increased looking or look times to all features of highest diagnosticity, which has been seen in young adults. Older adults and individuals with aphasia may benefit from additional processing time or additional trials during category learning to optimize attention and behavioral accuracy. Findings are relevant to consider in clinical settings where visual stimuli are presented as instructional, supporting, and/or compensatory tools.
Source: Topics in Language Disorders - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research