Indexes for the E-Baking Tray Task: A Look on Laterality, Verticality and Quality of Exploration

Abstract

The Baking Tray Task is an ecological task developed for the assessment of unilateral neglect that can also be used for research on neurotypical participants. In this task, participants are asked to place 16 objects inside a board as evenly as possible. In the case of impaired spatial exploration, consequent to right attentional networks damage, asymmetrical object disposition is observed as more objects are placed on the ipsilesional side (typically the right side). The E-BTT is a technology-enhanced version of the Baking Tray Task, implemented with a software platform, E-TAN, which detects the objects and automatically computes their spatial coordinates. This allows a complement to the traditional scoring methods with new measures to extract richer information from the data. In this study, we focus on neurotypical participants to explore if some new indexes, derived from the literature review on similar tasks, can be applied to BTT and E-BTT for research aims. A principal component analysis (PCA) was then performed to verify if these new indexes reflect some common dimensions. Results indicate the emergence of two principal dimensions: spatiality, which summarizes both laterality and verticality, and quality, which regards the explored space and (dis)organization in placing the items.