RESUMO
Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) typically present with attentional and oculomotor abnormalities that can have an impact on visual processing and associated cognitive functions. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a shift toward the analyses of eye movement behaviors as a means to further our understanding of the pathophysiology of common disorders such as AD. However, little work has been done to unveil the link between eye moment abnormalities and poor performance on cognitive tasks known to be markers for AD patients, such as the short-term memory-binding task. We analyzed eye movement fixation behaviors of thirteen healthy older adults (Controls) and thirteen patients with probable mild AD while they performed the visual short-term memory binding task. The short-term memory binding task asks participants to detect changes across two consecutive arrays of two bicolored object whose features (i.e., colors) have to be remembered separately (i.e., Unbound Colors), or combined within integrated objects (i.e., Bound Colors). Patients with mild AD showed the well-known pattern of selective memory binding impairments. This was accompanied by significant impairments in their eye movements only when they processed Bound Colors. Patients with mild AD remarkably decreased their mean gaze duration during the encoding of color-color bindings. These findings open new windows of research into the pathophysiological mechanisms of memory deficits in AD patients and the link between its phenotypic expressions (i.e., oculomotor and cognitive disorders). We discuss these findings considering current trends regarding clinical assessment, neural correlates, and potential avenues for robust biomarkers.
Assuntos
Doença de Alzheimer/complicações , Movimentos Oculares/fisiologia , Transtornos da Memória/etiologia , Memória de Curto Prazo/fisiologia , Percepção Visual/fisiologia , Idoso , Análise de Variância , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Entrevista Psiquiátrica Padronizada , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Estimulação Luminosa , Reconhecimento PsicológicoRESUMO
Microsaccade are sensitive to changes of perceptual inputs as well as modulations of cognitive states. There are just a few works analyzing microsaccade while subjects are processing complex information and fewer when doing predictions about upcoming events. To evaluate whether contextual predictability would change microsaccadic behavior, we evaluated microsaccade of twenty one persons when reading 40 regular sentences and 40 proverbs. Analysis of microsaccade during reading proverbs and regular sentences revealed that microsaccade rate on words before maxjump, during maxjump and words after maxjump varied depending on the kind of sentence and on the word predictability. Maxjump was defined as the word with the largest difference between the cloze predictability of two consecutive words. Low and high predictable words demanded less or more microsaccade on words previous, during and on maxjump depending of the semantic context and of the readers' predictions of upcoming words.In summary, the present study shows that microsaccade' rate evidenced significant differences when reading proverbs and regular sentences. Hence, evaluation of microsaccade during reading sentences with different contextual predictability might provide information about specific effect of cue attention on complex task.
Assuntos
Antecipação Psicológica , Leitura , Movimentos Sacádicos , Adulto , Aforismos e Provérbios como Assunto , Atenção , HumanosRESUMO
Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) develop progressive language, visuoperceptual, attentional, and oculomotor changes that can have an impact on their reading comprehension. However, few studies have examined reading behavior in AD, and none have examined the contribution of predictive cueing in reading performance. For this purpose we analyzed the eye movement behavior of 35 healthy readers (Controls) and 35 patients with probable AD during reading of regular and high-predictable sentences. The cloze predictability of words Nâ-â1, and Nâ+â1 exerted an influence on the reader's gaze duration. The predictabilities of preceding words in high-predictable sentences served as task-appropriate cues that were used by Control readers. In contrast, these effects were not present in AD patients. In Controls, changes in predictability significantly affected fixation duration along the sentence; noteworthy, these changes did not affect fixation durations in AD patients. Hence, only in healthy readers did predictability of upcoming words influence fixation durations via memory retrieval. Our results suggest that Controls used stored information of familiar texts for enhancing their reading performance and imply that contextual-word predictability, whose processing is proposed to require memory retrieval, only affected reading behavior in healthy subjects. In AD patients, this loss reveals impairments in brain areas such as those corresponding to working memory and memory retrieval. These findings might be relevant for expanding the options for the early detection and monitoring in the early stages of AD. Furthermore, evaluation of eye movements during reading could provide a new tool for measuring drug impact on patients' behavior.
Assuntos
Doença de Alzheimer/complicações , Movimentos Oculares/fisiologia , Transtornos da Memória/diagnóstico , Transtornos da Memória/etiologia , Memória de Curto Prazo/fisiologia , Idoso , Idoso de 80 Anos ou mais , Feminino , Humanos , Modelos Lineares , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Masculino , Rememoração Mental , Entrevista Psiquiátrica Padronizada , Valor Preditivo dos Testes , Semântica , Aprendizagem Verbal/fisiologiaRESUMO
Reading requires the integration of several central cognitive subsystems, ranging from attention and oculomotor control to word identification and language comprehension. Reading saccades and fixations contain information that can be correlated with word properties. When reading a sentence, the brain must decide where to direct the next saccade according to what has been read up to the actual fixation. In this process, the retrieval memory brings information about the current word features and attributes into working memory. According to this information, the prefrontal cortex predicts and triggers the next saccade. The frequency and cloze predictability of the fixated word, the preceding words and the upcoming ones affect when and where the eyes will move next. In this paper we present a diagnostic technique for early stage cognitive impairment detection by analyzing eye movements during reading proverbs. We performed a case-control study involving 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease and 40 age-matched, healthy control patients. The measurements were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models, revealing that eye movement behavior while reading can provide valuable information about whether a person is cognitively impaired. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using word-based properties, proverbs and linear mixed-effect models for identifying cognitive abnormalities.
Assuntos
Doença de Alzheimer/diagnóstico , Doença de Alzheimer/fisiopatologia , Atenção/fisiologia , Movimentos Oculares/fisiologia , Leitura , Semântica , Idoso , Análise de Variância , Feminino , Fixação Ocular , Humanos , Modelos Lineares , Masculino , Pessoa de Meia-IdadeRESUMO
Reading requires the fine integration of attention, ocular movements, word identification, and language comprehension, among other cognitive parameters. Several of the associated cognitive processes such as working memory and semantic memory are known to be impaired by Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study analyzes eye movement behavior of 18 patients with probable AD and 40 age-matched controls during Spanish sentence reading. Controls focused mainly on word properties and considered syntactic and semantic structures. At the same time, controls' knowledge and prediction about sentence meaning and grammatical structure are quite evident when we consider some aspects of visual exploration, such as word skipping, and forward saccades. By contrast, in the AD group, the predictability effect of the upcoming word was absent, visual exploration was less focused, fixations were much longer, and outgoing saccade amplitudes were smaller than those in controls. The altered visual exploration and the absence of a contextual predictability effect might be related to impairments in working memory and long-term memory retrieval functions. These eye movement measures demonstrate considerable sensitivity with respect to evaluating cognitive processes in Alzheimer's disease. They could provide a user-friendly marker of early disease symptoms and of its posterior progression.
Assuntos
Doença de Alzheimer/fisiopatologia , Atenção/fisiologia , Movimentos Oculares/fisiologia , Leitura , Semântica , Idoso , Estudos de Casos e Controles , Feminino , Lateralidade Funcional , Humanos , Modelos Lineares , Masculino , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Estimulação Luminosa , Valor Preditivo dos Testes , Sistema de Registros , VocabulárioRESUMO
PURPOSE: Eye movements follow a reproducible pattern during normal reading. Each eye movement ends up in a fixation point, which allows the brain to process the incoming information and to program the following saccade. Alzheimer disease (AD) produces eye movement abnormalities and disturbances in reading. In this work, we investigated whether eye movement alterations during reading might be already present at very early stages of the disease. METHODS: Twenty female and male adult patients with the diagnosis of probable AD and 20 age-matched individuals with no evidence of cognitive decline participated in the study. Participants were seated in front of a 20-inch LCD monitor and single sentences were presented on it. Eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker, with a sampling rate of 1000 Hz and an eye position resolution of 20 arc seconds. RESULTS: Analysis of eye movements during reading revealed that patients with early AD decreased the amount of words with only one fixation, increased their total number of first- and second-pass fixations, the amount of saccade regressions and the number of words skipped, compared with healthy individuals (controls). They also reduced the size of outgoing saccades, simultaneously increasing fixation duration. CONCLUSIONS: The present study shows that patients with mild AD evidenced marked alterations in eye movement behavior during reading, even at early stages of the disease. Hence, evaluation of eye movement behavior during reading might provide a useful tool for a more precise early diagnosis of AD and for dynamical monitoring of the pathology.