Investigating Attentional Allocation With Eye Tracking During Category Learning in People With Aphasia

Studies have identified deficits in attention in individuals with aphasia in language and nonlanguage tasks. Attention may play a role in the construction and use of language, as well as in learning and the process of rehabilitation, yet the role of attention on rehabilitation is not fully understood. To improve the understanding of attention and learning in aphasia, this study replicated an experiment that utilized category learning to examine attentional allocation. Ten individuals with aphasia subsequent to left hemisphere stroke and 20 age-matched controls completed a computer-based category learning task while eye gaze data were collected using an eye tracker. Stimulus items comprised 4 features that differed in the reliability with which they predicted category membership (referred to as their diagnosticity). In this study, no differences were observed between individuals with aphasia and control participants on behavioral measures of accuracy and response time, though accuracies overall were lower than those of prior studies examining this task in young adults. Eye gaze data demonstrated that over the course of training, controls and individuals with aphasia learned to reduce the number of looks to the feature of lowest diagnosticity, suggestive of optimized attentional allocation. Eye gaze patterns, however, did not show increased looking or look times to all features of highest diagnosticity, which has been seen in young adults. Older adults and individuals with aphasia may benefit from additional processing time or additional trials during category learning to optimize attention and behavioral accuracy. Findings are relevant to consider in clinical settings where visual stimuli are presented as instructional, supporting, and/or compensatory tools.