Normative Values of the Groffman Visual Tracing Test for the Assessment of Oculomotor Performance in the Adult Population

Abstract

The Groffman visual tracing (GVT) test is an indirect psychometric measure of oculomotor performance, used for the clinical assessment of eye movements. The test consists of two cards with five contorted lines of increasing overlap, crowding, and difficulty. The task starts from each of the letters at the top of the page, follows the line from the letter to the corresponding number at the bottom of the page, and the number is named. Although the GVT test was developed for the evaluation of children, it has also been applied to adults with visual and cognitive deficits. However, it lacks reference values. Therefore, the aim of the study was to assess oculomotor behavior across the typical human lifespan and to define normative data in an adult population. A total of 526 adults aged between 20 and 79 years, all without neurological or psychiatric deficits, were enrolled in the study. The results were analyzed by considering the accuracy and execution times separately. An influence of age, education and sex for accuracy was found, and age for the execution times was found. Norms for adults were developed considering the specific structure of the test and the accuracy and the execution time separately. The GVT test can now be applied in healthy and neurological adult populations for the evaluation of oculomotor performance.

Broken Ring enVision Search (BReViS): A New Clinical Test of Attention to Assess the Effect of Layout and Crowding on Visual Search

“…Due to the presence of extreme outliers in the performance time, 13 participants were excluded, leading to a final sample of 550 participants (see Section 2.4 ). The specific procedure used for filtering is the same as previously used [ 12 ] and is detailed in the statistical methods section.…”

“…Normative reference values were defined in the second part. The regression-based procedure definition of norms was used, which includes several consecutive steps [ 12 , 61 , 62 , 63 ] in line with other visuo-spatial [ 64 , 65 ] and different neuropsychological tests [ 66 , 67 ]. First, in order to find the most appropriate transformation of confounding demographic variables (age, education and gender) on the dependent variables (the four indexes mentioned above, taken separately), the general linear model (GLM) was used.…”

“…Visual search tasks have often been used together with eye-tracking devices, which represent a useful tool for the study of human attention, allowing the tracking of shifts in attention through the recreation of the pattern of saccades and fixations carried out by the individual [ 10 ]. However, outside of the laboratory, eye-tracking devices are not practical and can be replaced by other measurement methods of oculo-motor behaviour [ 11 , 12 , 13 ].…”