Oculomotor Activity during Solution of Visual Cognitive Tasks in Different Time Conditions

Oculomotor activity is a physiological marker of visual cognitive activity. Parameters of visuomotor reactions reflect the cerebral processes of the perception, processing, and understanding of the incoming information. In modern society, people live in conditions of rapid socioeconomic and technological change, with high information loads, an accelerated pace of life, and ever more frequent pressures of time. activity in conditions of acute lack of time or work carried out in very strict timeframes is characterized by the use of additional physiological reserves, and impairment of psychological and psychophysiological balance, along with changes in brain activity, which can lead to the development of stress reactions. People with different types of autonomic functional regulation mount responses to stress which have specific features which can be followed in the functioning of the most reactive of the body systems, affecting brain activity, and, consequently, being reflected in the parameters of oculomotor activity on performance of visual cognitive activity. A total of 70 students at the Lomonosov Northern (Arctic) Federal University were studied. Oculomotor reactions were studied in students with different autonomic status while solving cognitive tasks at their own speed and in conditions of limited time. The most sensitive parameters of oculomotor reactions during reading in conditions of time restriction were identified: the frequency of fixations, the mean durations of fixations, the dispersion of fixations, and saccade amplitude and speed. These markers were found to vary among subjects with different individual-typological characteristics of autonomic status. People with different autonomic nervous system status were found to display different task performance effectiveness during cognitive work in different time conditions. The most effective and fastest processing of visual information in conditions of limited time, accompanied by increases in fixation frequency and decreases in fixation duration, was characteristic of people with normotonic autonomic status. © 2022, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.