Understanding children ’s attention to dental caries through eye-tracking

Visual attention is a significant gateway to a child's mind, and looking is one of the first behaviours young children develop. Untreated caries and the resulting poor dental aesthetics can have adverse emotional and social impacts on children's oral health-related quality of life due to its detrimental effects on self-esteem and self-concept. Therefore, we explored preschool children's eye movement patterns and visual attention to images with and without dental caries via eye movement analysis using hidden Markov models (EMHMM). We calibrated a convenience sample of 157 preschool children to the eye-tracker (Tobii Nano Pro) to ensure standardisation. Consequently, each participant viewed the same standardised pictures with and without dental caries while an eye-tracking device tracked their eye movements. Subsequently, based on the sequence of viewed regions of interest (ROIs), a transition matrix was developed where the participants previously viewed ROI informed their subsequently considered ROI. Hence, an individual's HMM was estimated from their eye movement data using a variational Bayesian approach to determine the optimal number of ROIs automatically. Consequently, this data-driven approach generated the visual task participants' most representative eye movement patterns. Preschool children exhibited two different eye movement patterns, distributed (78%) and selective (21%), which was statistically significant. Children switched between images with more similar probab...
Source: Caries Research - Category: Dentistry Source Type: research