Design of Digitized Visual Search Task for Assessment of Aging Effects

Mild cognitive impairments (MCI) develop in adults due to the normal aging process and may sometimes progress to a more serious cognitive decline stage resulting in Dementia. If the cognitive decline is identified at the MCI stage, it can be delayed or prevented from progressing by different interventions. A typical indicator of cognitive impairments that might be caused due to an injury, aging, or other factors is found to be a decreased search efficiency in visual search tasks. Here we propose a model to assess this efficiency by designing a digitized, easy-to-use visual search task capable of incorporating multiple variables in the visual stimulus, affecting the search capabilities. The variables under consideration include the number of distracting elements, target size, target distance from the center of the stimulus area, and habituation effects. This designed stimulus is tested on participants from different age groups.