THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OCULOMOTOR ERROR RATES AND SPEED OF INFORMATION PROCESSING

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OCULOMOTOR ERROR RATES AND SPEED OF INFORMATION PROCESSING Dieudonne Ininahazwe1* and Alison Bowling1 1 Southern Cross University, Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Australia Aims: The Australian population aged 65 years and over has increased by 19% within the last five years. Therefore, to optimise healthy aging, it is vital to understand aging-related cognitive changes. The oculomotor capture task (OCT) involves evaluating the rate of erroneous saccades made to a distracting stimulus in an array of dots. Studies using this task have found that older participants exhibit higher rates of erroneous eye-movements and have slower reaction times (RT) than younger participants. These error rates are also correlated with choice RT suggesting that information processing speed (IPS) affects error rate. Therefore, the current study investigated the extent to which individuals’ performance on various IPS tasks predict their performance on the OCT. It was anticipated that both older and individuals with slower IPS will exhibit more erroneous eye-movements compared to younger and individuals with faster IPS. Methods: Fifty participants aged between 18 to 60 years (M = 37.11, SD = 12.08) completed the OCT. The percentage of reflexive eye-movements made towards the task-irrelevant abrupt distractor was measured. Participants subsequently completed three IPS tasks including Simple RT, Choice RT and Posner letter classification tasks. Results: The results indicated that out of the three predictors, only Choice RT significantly accounted for the variance in the percentage of reflexive eye-movements, R2 = .387, adjusted R2 = .324, F (4, 34) = 3.589, P = .017. Conclusion: Overall, the current study found a weak relationship between age, IPS, and the percentage of reflexive eye-movements. It is argued that speed of information processing predicts percentage of reflexive saccades in the OCT. Keywords: attentional control, oculomotor capture, Information processing speed, eye-movement, aging effects Conference: Southern Cross University 13th Annual Honours Psychology Research Conference, Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia, 7 Oct - 7 Oct, 2016. Presentation Type: Research Topic: Psychology Citation: Ininahazwe D and Bowling A (2016). THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OCULOMOTOR ERROR RATES AND SPEED OF INFORMATION PROCESSING. Front. Public Health. Conference Abstract: Southern Cross University 13th Annual Honours Psychology Research Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.FPUBH.2016.02.00018 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 29 Sep 2016; Published Online: 30 Sep 2016. * Correspondence: Mr. Dieudonne Ininahazwe, Southern Cross University, Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450, Australia, d.ininahazwe.10@student.scu.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Dieudonne Ininahazwe Alison Bowling Google Dieudonne Ininahazwe Alison Bowling Google Scholar Dieudonne Ininahazwe Alison Bowling PubMed Dieudonne Ininahazwe Alison Bowling Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.