Josef Stoll

Validation of mobile eye-tracking as novel and efficient means for differentiating progressive supranuclear palsy from Parkinson's disease

Background: The decreased ability to carry out vertical saccades is a key symptom of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). Objective measurement devices can help to reliably detect subtle eye movement disturbances to improve sensitivity and specificity of the clinical diagnosis. The present study aims at transferring findings from restricted stationary video-oculography (VOG) to a wearable head-mounted device, which can be readily applied in clinical practice. Methods: We investigated the eye movements in 10 possible or probable PSP patients, 11 Parkinsons disease (PD) patients, and 10 age-matched healthy controls (HCs) using a mobile, gaze-driven video camera setup (EyeSeeCam). Ocular movements were analyzed during a standardized fixation protocol and in an unrestricted real-life scenario while walking along a corridor. Results: The EyeSeeCam detected prominent impairment of both saccade velocity and amplitude in PSP patients, differentiating them from PD and HCs. Differences were particularly evident for saccades in the vertical plane, and stronger for saccades than for other eye movements. Differences were more pronounced during the standardized protocol than in the real-life scenario. Conclusions: Combined analysis of saccade velocity and saccade amplitude during the fixation protocol with the EyeSeeCam provides a simple, rapid (<20 s), and reliable tool to differentiate clinically established PSP patients from PD and HCs. As such, our findings prepare the ground for using wearable eye-tracking in patients with uncertain diagnoses.

Overt attention in natural scenes: Objects dominate features

Whether overt attention in natural scenes is guided by object content or by low-level stimulus features has become a matter of intense debate. Experimental evidence seemed to indicate that once object locations in a scene are known, salience models provide little extra explanatory power. This approach has recently been criticized for using inadequate models of early salience; and indeed, state-of-the-art salience models outperform trivial object-based models that assume a uniform distribution of fixations on objects. Here we propose to use object-based models that take a preferred viewing location (PVL) close to the centre of objects into account. In experiment 1, we demonstrate that, when including this comparably subtle modification, object-based models again are at par with state-of-the-art salience models in predicting fixations in natural scenes. One possible interpretation of these results is that objects rather than early salience dominate attentional guidance. In this view, early-salience models predict fixations through the correlation of their features with object locations. To test this hypothesis directly, in two additional experiments we reduced low-level salience in image areas of high object content. For these modified stimuli, the object-based model predicted fixations significantly better than early salience. This finding held in an object-naming task (experiment 2) and a free-viewing task (experiment 3). These results provide further evidence for object-based fixation selection--and by inference object-based attentional guidance--in natural scenes.

Gaze and discomfort glare, Part 1: Development of a gaze-driven photometry

Discomfort glare is a major challenge for the design of workplaces. The existing metrics for discomfort glare prediction share the limitation that they do not take gaze direction into account. To overcome this limitation, we developed a ‘gaze-driven’ method for discomfort glare assessment. We conducted a series of experiments under simulated office conditions and recorded the participants’ gaze using mobile eye tracking and the luminance distributions using high dynamic range imaging methods. The two methods were then integrated to derive ‘gaze-centred’ luminance measurements in the field of view. The existing ‘fixed-gaze’ and the newly developed ‘gaze-driven’ measurement methods are compared. Our results show that there is a significant difference between the two methods. In this paper, the procedure for integrating the recorded luminance images with the recorded gaze dynamics for obtaining gaze-centred luminance data is described. This gaze-centred luminance data will be compared to the subjective assessment of glare in Part 2 of this study.