Autonomic correlates of attention tests delivered by commercial tools

Abstract

Attention tests are among the most widely used for characterizing one of the most important human cognitive domains. However, their link with emotional processes and physiological reactions is not fully clear and often debated. To this extent, in this pilot we used commercially available tools for administering a validated attentional test and, at the same time, to unobtrusively record physiological parameters related to the autonomic nervous system activity in a small cohort of young, healthy individuals. Preliminary results demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and suggested that the methodology employed was somewhat sensitive to detect changes related to the task administered in the cohort studied. Such results would probably pave the way for a future exploitation of integrated hardware/software systems tailored at detecting psychophysiological changes eventually occurring during cognitive testing administration.