Visual object and face processing in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease: from segmentation to imagination.

Full Abstract

Little is known about the fate of higher level visual perception and visual mental imagery in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we assessed these abilities in a group of mild-to-moderate AD patients using tasks selected to satisfy two main criteria. First, they have been shown to be sensitive to impairments of perception and imagery caused by other neurological conditions. Second, they test specific stages of visual perception and cognition in a reasonably selective manner. These stages were (in their normal order of occurrence during perception):
the segmentation of different local points of the visual field into regions belonging to distinct objects; the representation of the shapes of these segmented regions in the image; the construction of more abstract shape representations that possess constancy over changes in size, location, orientation or illumination (assessed separately for faces and objects); the use of these perceived shape representations to access stored shape representations; and the access of lexical semantic representations from these high-level visual representations. Additional tasks tested the top-down activation of earlier visual representations from the semantic level in visual mental imagery. Our findings indicate small, but in most cases reliable, impairments in visual perception, which are independent of degree of cognitive decline. Deficits in basic shape processing influenced performance on some higher level visual tasks, but did not contribute to poor performance on face processing, or to the profound deficit on object naming. The latter of these is related to semantic-lexical impairment.

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Author information

Author/s: Tippett, Lynette J (LJ); Blackwood, Kirsty (K); Farah, Martha J (MJ);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. l.tippett(-atsign-)auckland.ac.nz

Grants: K02-AG0056 (Agency:United States NIA) ; R01-AG14082 (Agency:United States NIA)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

Journal: Neuropsychologia (Neuropsychologia), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-; vol 41 (issue 4) : pp 453-68

Dates: Created 2003/01/31; Completed 2003/04/07; Revised 2007/11/14;

PMID: 12559162, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Alzheimer Disease - psychology
Case-Control Studies
Face
Female

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