Populations Norms for "SLURP"-An iPad App for Quantification of Visuomotor Coordination Testing.

Barbara M Junghans,Sieu K Khuu

doi:10.3389/fnins.2019.00711

Abstract

Currently the integrity of brain function that drives behavior is predominantly measured in terms of pure motor function, yet most human behavior is visually driven. A means of easily quantifying such visually-driven brain function for comparison against population norms is lacking. Analysis of eye-hand coordination (EHC) using a digital game-like situation with downloadable spatio-temporal details has potential for clinicians and researchers. A simplified protocol for the Lee-Ryan EHC (Slurp) Test app for iPad® has been developed to monitor EHC. The two subtests selected, each of six quickly completed items with appeal to all ages, were found equivalent in terms of total errors/time and sensitive to developmental and aging milestones known to affect EHC. The sensitivity of outcomes due to the type of stylus being used during testing was also explored. Populations norms on 221 participants aged 5 to 80+years are presented for each test item according to two commonly used stylus types. The Slurp app uses two-dimensional space and is suited to clinicians for pre/post-intervention testing and to researchers in psychological, medical, and educational domains who are interested in understanding brain function.

Highlights

Human behavior is largely driven by visual information (Bisley, 2011), making visual function the most appropriate measure of brain function
As a simpler test protocol is highly desirable for the Slurp test, the current study aimed to describe age-norms for visually normal persons without cognitive or neural impairment on two statistically equivalent subtests of the Slurp eye-hand coordination (EHC) Test, under conditions using two readily available but quite different types of stylus
The study was approved by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Human Research Ethics Advisory (HREA) Panel D: Biomedical

Summary

Introduction

Human behavior is largely driven by visual information (Bisley, 2011), making visual function the most appropriate measure of brain function. Choice of an object to reach, touch, grasp, or even avoid, assumes executive planning that has already engaged endogenous and exogenously activated neural networks (Corbetta and Shulman, 2002) Such dorsal stream networks involve control and direction of selective visual attention, as well as the interaction of long term and working memory with the ventral visual stream as needed for exogenous identification and grasping of an object (for example, is it stationary or moving?), plus a semantic understanding of the object’s characteristics. Engagement of parieto-frontal dorsal networks along with aspects of motor and somatosensory networks is required to plan these goaldirected shifts of attention to appropriately “weight” the grasp suited to an object’s characteristics (for example, whether fine, slippery, breakable, heavy, or if moving)

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Conclusion