A Comparison of the Visual Attention Patterns of People With Aphasia and Adults Without Neurological Conditions for Camera-Engaged and Task-Engaged Visual Scenes.

PURPOSE: The purpose of the study was to compare the visual attention patterns of adults with aphasia and adults without neurological conditions when viewing visual scenes with 2 types of engagement. METHOD: Eye-tracking technology was used to measure the visual attention patterns of 10 adults with aphasia and 10 adults without neurological conditions. Participants viewed camera-engaged (i.e., human figure facing camera) and task-engaged (i.e., human figure looking at and touching an object) visual scenes. RESULTS: Participants with aphasia responded to engagement cues by focusing on objects of interest more for task-engaged scenes than camera-engaged scenes; however, the difference in their responses to these scenes were not as pronounced as those observed in adults without neurological conditions. In addition, people with aphasia spent more time looking at background areas of interest and less time looking at person areas of interest for camera-engaged scenes than did control participants. CONCLUSIONS: Results indicate people with aphasia visually attend to scenes differently than adults without neurological conditions. As a consequence, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) facilitators may have different visual attention behaviors than the people with aphasia for whom they are constructing or selecting visual scenes. Further examination of the visual attention of people with aphasia may help optimize visual scene selection.

Measurement of the visual attention patterns of people with aphasia: a preliminary investigation of two types of human engagement in photographic images.

The focus of this investigation was to examine the visual attention patterns of adults with aphasia on task-engaged contextualized images in which a human figure was engaged with the context of the image and camera-engaged contextualized images in which a human figure was looking forward toward the camera. Analysis revealed that adults with aphasia tend to fixate rapidly and frequently on human figures in contextualized images regardless of the type of engagement in the image. In addition, they responded to engagement cues when viewing task-engaged contextualized images by fixating more frequently and more rapidly on the object area of interest for these images than for camera-engaged contextualized images.