The relationship between brain lateralization and cognitive functions is well-documented. The left hemisphere primarily handles tasks such as language and arithmetic, while the right hemisphere is involved in creative activities like drawing and music perception. Eye-tracking technology has shown the potential to reveal cognitive states by measuring ocular metrics such as pupil diameter and fixation duration. However, the ability to distinguish lateralized brain activity using these ocular metrics remains underexplored. Here, we demonstrate that pupil diameter and fixation duration can effectively classify left and right brain hemisphere activities. We obtained a considerably high classification performance, with an F1 score of 0.894. The results suggest that ocular metrics are robust indicators of lateralized brain activity and can be applied in cognitive monitoring and neurorehabilitation. Our future work expands on this by integrating these methods into real-time applications EyeBrain, potentially broadening their use across various cognitive and neurological domains.
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a prevalent condition that remains difficult to diagnose in its early stages. Oculomotor dysfunction is a well-established marker of mTBI, motivating the development of portable tools that capture both eye-movement behavior and underlying neurophysiology. In this work, we present an initial framework that integrates electroencephalogram (EEG) with augmented-reality (AR)-based Vestibular/Ocular Motor Screening (VOMS) tasks to estimate subject-specific ocular response times. Pre-processed EEG signals, obtained through band-pass filtering and average referencing, are analyzed using a Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT)-driven deep neural framework. The RDWT coefficients are subjected to trainable zero-phase convolutional filtering and reconstructed into the time domain via inverse RDWT, followed by channel-wise temporal and spatial filtering using 2D convolution layers and convolutional-LSTM-based decoding. An ablation study demonstrates that wavelet-domain filtering serves as an effective denoising strategy, improving prediction performance. Sliding-window predictions were validated using Pearson correlation (>= 0.5), and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) was subsequently used to estimate ocular response times. DTW-derived metrics revealed significant inter-subject differences across all VOM tasks, supported by Mann-Whitney U tests. Cross-correlation analysis further revealed task-dependent temporal behaviors: pursuit tasks exhibited reactive tracking, whereas saccades showed anticipatory responses. Overall, the results highlight pursuit tasks as particularly informative for distinguishing timing differences and demonstrate the potential of RDWT-based EEG features combined with DTW metrics for multimodal mTBI assessment.
Shantanu Sarkar, Sai Shashank Gandavarapu, Jeff Feng +3
Cognitive workload monitoring is important for adaptive rehabilitation and assistive interfaces, where task difficulty, pacing, and feedback should be adjusted according to the user's cognitive state to avoid overload and under-challenge. Emerging extended reality and robot-assisted rehabilitation environments provide controllable training tasks, but they require unobtrusive sensing methods that can capture rapid ocular dynamics during interaction. Existing eye-movement-based cognitive workload recognition methods mainly rely on frame-based eye trackers, which often suffer from limited temporal resolution and degraded robustness under rapid eye movements. In contrast, event cameras provide microsecond-level temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency, making them suitable for capturing fine-grained ocular dynamics. Many previous studies rely on free-viewing or similar paradigms, where gaze locations can vary across tasks. As a result, models may learn associations between gaze-location distributions and cognitive workload, rather than workload-related eye movement characteristics themselves. In this work, we introduce EveLoad, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first event-based eye-movement dataset with graded cognitive workload annotations, collected from 20 healthy participants under spatially constrained and task-driven conditions using a controlled N-back-guided fixation paradigm. Based on this dataset, we establish a benchmark for cognitive workload recognition with six workload levels and propose a learning framework that encodes spatiotemporal event representations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an average subject-specific accuracy of 96.36% and 96.13% under mixed random split evaluation. These results suggest that event-based eye movements may provide a useful sensing pathway for future workload-aware rehabilitation.
When humans and large language models (LLMs) process the same text, activations in the LLMs correlate with brain activity measured, e.g., with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Moreover, it has been shown that, as the training of an LLM progresses, the performance in predicting brain activity from its internal activations improves more in the left hemisphere than in the right one. The aim of the present work is to understand which kind of competence acquired by the LLMs underlies the emergence of this left-right asymmetry. Using the OLMo-2 7B language model at various training checkpoints and fMRI data from English participants, we compare the evolution of the left-right asymmetry in the correlation between brain activity and model predictions alongside performance on several benchmarks. We observe that the asymmetry co-emerges with the formal linguistic abilities of the LLM. These abilities are demonstrated in two ways: by the model's capacity to assign a higher probability to an acceptable sentence than to a grammatically unacceptable one within a minimal contrasting pair, and by its ability to produce well-formed text. By contrast, the left-right asymmetry does not align with the performance on arithmetic or Dyck language tasks; nor with text-based tasks involving world knowledge and reasoning. We generalize these results to another family of LLMs (Pythia) and two other languages, French and Chinese. Our observations indicate that the left-right asymmetry in brain predictivity matches the progress in formal linguistic competence.