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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0863

Visual exploration in the Cookie Theft task: eye-tracking markers of apathy

VISUAL EXPLORATION IN THE COOKIE THEFT TASK: EYE-TRACKING MARKERS OF APATHY

The poster presents a study protocol, for which data have not yet been collected, aimed at measuring apathy in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease using a digital phenotype that combines eye tracking and language production.

The aim is to objectively characterize apathy in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease using a digital phenotype that measures visual exploration and language production together. The planned sample comprises 72 participants: 24 healthy controls, 24 patients with bvFTD, and 24 patients with Alzheimer's disease. Participants' eye movements and speech will be recorded simultaneously as they describe the Cookie Theft picture from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) for 1.5 minutes. Visual exploration will be characterized using six measures: gaze entropy, fixation distribution, area of interest (AOI) entropy, gaze transition measures, within-scene and between-scene transitions, and the speech AOI ratio; meaningful areas of interest are grouped into two scene clusters: children/cookies and mother/sink. The speech AOI ratio is defined as the proportion of fixations directed toward the area corresponding to the item mentioned in speech and will be coded frame by frame by two independent coders. The poster contains no outcome data; data collection is scheduled to begin in September 2026, with preliminary results expected in 2027. The authors hypothesize that participants with bvFTD and Alzheimer's disease who have apathy will exhibit distinct oculomotor and speech–gaze patterns, particularly reduced speech–gaze alignment.

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