Impact of Anxiety on Eye Markers: Role of Visual Task Complexity
Authors: Sharma Saurabh , Aatrai Sonali , Guha Rajlakshmi 
Published: June 2024

Anxiety and visual task difficulty may interact, impose cognitive demands, and affect task performance. Researchers have found that when comparing task performance across people with different levels of anxiety vulnerability, people with somewhat elevated anxiety vulnerability perform worse than people with lower anxiety susceptibility. Furthermore, vulnerability to anxiety is associated with a decreased ability to control the allocation of attention that is reflected while performing tasks. We aim to see the role of visual task complexity as potential mediators in the relation between different levels of anxiety and eye movements and to see whether increasing task complexity has an effect on visualization behaviour. We use eye-movement analysis to observe and analyze how people view and subsequently process visual information. After the screening, the study recruited 31 students (F= 11; M=20) aged between 21 to 35 years (M=28.02, SD=0.62). Exclusion criteria included individuals with visual impairments, with substance disorders and history of neurological disorders. All participants provided consent before participation. STAI-Y2 was used to categorize participants into low, moderate, and high (N=9, N=10, and N= 12). Visual task involved arithmetic problems and determining the accuracy of the answer displayed (true or false). Each level was divided into two subsets, each containing six equations with a combination of numbers, alphabet characters, and spatial symbols (>, <). To heighten task complexity, one subset required participants to respond synchronously using their right index finger for true and left index finger for false, while the other subset required asynchronous responses (left index finger for true, right index finger for false). Relevant information to solve the problems consisted of numbers and spatial symbols, while alphabet characters were considered irrelevant or noise. The First Fixation Duration (FFD), Time to First Fixation (TTFF), Total Visit Duration (TVD), Total Fixation Duration (TFD) were computed after ascertaining the Area of Interests (AOIs). The findings suggest that individuals with high trait anxiety tend to explore or scan irrelevant information more compared to low and moderate trait anxiety levels while performing the task, particularly during more complex visual tasks. Individuals in the low and moderate anxiety groups showed better ability to fixate on relevant information during the same tasks. The study's findings suggest that eye metrics, such as fixation duration and visit duration on relevant and irrelevant information, could serve as objective markers indicating anxiety related attentional differences during task performance. The results are in line with previous research supporting the correlation between anxiety and eye metrics. Our study corroborates with existing literature, which posits that highly anxious individuals may experience impaired attentional control during task performance. The study provides valuable insights into the impact of anxiety on attention and information processing during visual tasks of varying complexity.