Visual search gaze patterns identify mild cognitive impairment

In a propensity-matched cohort of 62 cognitively normal adults and 62 individuals with mild cognitive impairment, researchers tracked gaze behavior during a naturalistic scene-viewing search task. Participants searched scenes across five distractor conditions: none, dissimilar, similar, background, and unexpected. The preprint reported significant differences between groups in target dwell ratio and scanpath entropy, along with higher trial-to-trial variability in area-of-interest coverage among participants with mild cognitive impairment. These search disruptions occurred across all distractor contexts and in the absence of distractors. Repeated cross-validation with automated feature selection classified cognitively normal controls from individuals with mild cognitive impairment with an area under the curve of 0.732 (95% CI [0.645, 0.818]), while an expert-curated 14-feature panel reached 0.898 (95% CI [0.840, 0.949]).