Applying the Inverse Efficiency Score to Visual–Motor Task for Studying Speed-Accuracy Performance While Aging

Abstract

Background: The current study examines the relationship between speed and accuracy of performance in a reaction time setting and explores the informative value of the inverse efficiency score (IES) regarding the possibility to reflect age-related cognitive changes.Objectives: To study the characteristics of speed and accuracy while performing psychophysiological tests throughout the lifespan; to examine the speed-accuracy ratio in age groups and to apply IES to discriminative visual-motor reaction task; and to figure out the predictive potential of psychophysiological tests to identify IES values.Methods: We utilize nonparametric statistical tests, regression analysis, and supervised machine learning methods.Results and Conclusion: The examinees under 20 and over 60 years of age share one tendency regarding the speed-accuracy ratio without speed-accuracy trade-off. Both at the time of active developmental changes in adolescence and during ongoing atrophic changes in elderly there is a tendency toward a rise of the number of mistakes while slowing the reaction. In the age range from 20 to 60 the relationship between the speed and accuracy is opposite and speed-accuracy trade-off is present. In our battery, complex visual-motor reaction is the only test with the significant negative association between reaction time and error rate in the subcohort of young and midlife adults taken together. On average, women perform more slowly and accurately than men in the speed-accuracy task, however most of the gender-related differences are insignificant. Using results of other psychophysiological tests, we predicted IES values for the visual-motor reaction with high accuracy (R2 = 0.77 ± 0.08; mean absolute error / IES range = 3.37%). The regression model shows the best performance in the cognitively preserved population groups of young and middle-aged adults (20–60 years). Because of the individual rate of neurodevelopment in youth and cognitive decline in the elderly, the regression model for these subcohorts has a low predictive performance. IES accounts for different cognitive subdomains and may reflect their disproportional changes throughout the lifespan. This encourages us to proceed to explore the combination of executive functioning and psychophysiological test results utilizing machine learning models. The latter can be designed as a reliable computer-aided detector of cognitive changes at early stages.

Predicting Age From Behavioral Test Performance for Screening Early Onset of Cognitive Decline

“…The dataset is available on demand (see section 8). A thorough description of the dataset has been previously published (Statsenko et al, 2020 ).…”

Data_Sheet_1.PDF

“…Random Forest regressor showed the best performance (3.36%). The accuracy of the models is higher than that of the models that we built recently for predicting IES score out of PT data (3.36-3.77% vs. 3.37-5.15%) (Statsenko et al, 2020).…”

“…The predictive accuracy is almost equal in all the age-groups studied. In contrast to this, the performance of predicting IES varies regarding the age: It is maximal for Adolescents and a bit lower for Older adults (Statsenko et al, 2020). This reduces the reliability of IES and makes ISCA the most suitable index for assessing psychophysiological performance and comparing the results irrespective of the age of examinees.…”

“…IES score summarizes the overall efficiency of decision-making. IES accounts for different cognitive subdomains and may reflect their disproportional changes throughout the lifespan (Statsenko et al, 2020). We took into consideration that some studies documented differences between the lifelong changes of SVMR and CVMR (Der and Deary, 2006), but no study showed the same for IES scores.…”

Age-related effects on lexical, but not syntactic, processes during sentence production

“…In order to investigate the possibility of a speed-accuracy trade-off in older adults, we calculated the inverse efficiency score (IES) per participant per condition (Townsend & Ashby, 1978). 7 This is a linear integration measure of each participant's onset latencies and error rates, and can be considered as the onset latency corrected for the amount of errors committed (Vandierendonck, 2017(Vandierendonck, , 2018, meaning that it is able to account for possible speed-accuracy trade-off effects (for similar approaches in ageing research, see Anzures et al, 2010;Statsenko et al, 2020). Analyses of the IES using mixed-effects models produced the same effects that were observed in the onset latency analyses.…”