Preserved extra-foveal processing of object semantics in Alzheimer’s disease

Francesco Cimminella, Giorgia D'Innocenzo, Sergio Della Sala, Alessandro Iavarone, Caterina Musella, Moreno I. Coco*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients underperform on a range of tasks requiring semantic processing, but it is unclear whether this impairment is due to a generalised loss of semantic knowledge or to issues in accessing and selecting such information from memory. The objective of this eye-tracking visual search study was to determine whether semantic expectancy mechanisms known to support object recognition in healthy adults are preserved in AD patients. Furthermore, as AD patients are often reported to be impaired in accessing information in extra-foveal vision, we investigated whether that was also the case in our study. Twenty AD patients and twenty age-matched controls searched for a target object among an array of distractors presented extra-foveally. The distractors were either semantically related or unrelated to the target (e.g., a car in an array with other vehicles or kitchen items). Results showed that semantically related objects were detected with more difficulty than semantically unrelated objects by both groups, but more markedly by the AD group. Participants looked earlier and for longer at the critical objects when these were semantically unrelated to the distractors. Our findings show that AD patients can process the semantics of objects and access it in extra-foveal vision. This suggests that their impairments in semantic processing may reflect difficulties in accessing semantic information rather than a generalised loss of semantic memory.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)418-433
JournalJournal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology
Volume35
Issue number3
Early online date28 May 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2022

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • visual search
  • Alzheimer's disease
  • semantic processing
  • eye-tracking

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