Cognitive mediated eye movements during the SDMT reveal the challenges with processing speed faced by people with MS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background The Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) is regarded as the cognitive test of choice for people with MS (pwMS). While deficits are linked to impaired processing speed, the mechanisms by which they arise are unclear. Cognitive-mediated eye movements offer one putative explanation. The objective of this study was to determine the association between eye movements and performance on the SDMT. Methods Thirty-three people with confirmed MS and 25 matched healthy control subjects (HC) were administered the oral SDMT while eye movements were recorded. Results Mean SDMT scores were significantly lower in pwMS ( p < 0.038). Shorter mean saccade distance in the key area ( p = 0.007), more visits to the key area per response ( p = 0.014), and more total number of fixations in the test area ( p = 0.045) differentiated pwMS from HCs. A hierarchical regression analysis revealed that the number of visits to the key area per response ( p < 0.001; ΔR 2 = 0.549) and total number of fixations in the test area (p < 0.001; ΔR 2 = 0.782) were the most robust predictors of SDMT scores. Conclusion Cognitive-mediated eye movements help elucidate the processing speed challenges confronted by people with MS. Mechanistic insights such as these can potentially help inform new cognitive rehabilitation strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".