Title: Developing the Saccade-Antisaccade Test: A Digital Measure of Cognitive Acuity for Business Decision-Making
Author(s) : David McLain
Cognitive acuity is increasingly vital for business, enabling rapid decisions under uncertainty to enhance performance and error prevention in roles reliant on complex, ever-evolving technologies, such as strategic management and data analytics. Existing measures, often clinical or practitioner-based, risk subjectivity, inconsistent administration, and unreliable interpretation, limiting their utility. This paper presents the early development of the Saccade-Antisaccade Test (SAT), a digital, visual tool designed to overcome these limitations through standardized administration and precise response-time measurement. In a pilot study with 12 healthy participants (9 males, 3 females, aged 21–24), saccade response times showed a modest positive correlation with digital maze solution times (r = .12) and a weak negative correlation with ambiguity tolerance (r = -.06), defined as sensitivity to information characteristics like complexity. Antisaccade times had lower correlations (r = .08 and -.03, respectively). These preliminary findings support further SAT refinement as a cognitive acuity measure, pending larger-scale validation.