Attentional control in Alzheimer's disease

被引:303
作者
Baddeley, AD
Baddeley, HA
Bucks, RS
Wilcock, GK
机构
[1] Univ Bristol, Dept Expt Psychol, Bristol BS8 1TN, Avon, England
[2] Univ Bristol, Dept Care Elderly, Bristol BS8 1TN, Avon, England
基金
英国医学研究理事会;
关键词
Alzheimer's disease; attention; executive processing; working memory;
D O I
10.1093/brain/124.8.1492
中图分类号
R74 [神经病学与精神病学];
学科分类号
摘要
Attentional control of executive function declines during the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Controversy exists as to whether this decline results from a single global deficit or whether attentional control can be fractionated, with some aspects being more vulnerable than others. We investigated three proposed domains of attention, namely (i) focal attention, based on simple and choice reaction times; (ii) the capacity to resist distraction in a visual search task; and (iii) the capacity to divide attention between two simultaneous tasks. For each domain, two levels of difficulty were used to study Alzheimer's disease patients, who were compared with elderly and young control subjects. The unitary attentional hypothesis predicted that the impacts of level of difficulty, age and disease would be qualitatively similar across the three attentional domains. In fact we observed different patterns for each domain. We obtained no differential impairment for patients in the focal attentional task, whereas patients were somewhat more susceptible than control subjects to the similarity of the distractor items in visual search. Finally, we observed marked impairment in the capacity of Alzheimer's disease patients to combine performance on two simultaneous tasks, in contrast to preserved dual-task performance in the normal elderly group. These results suggest a need to fractionate executive processes, and reinforce earlier evidence for a specific dual-task processing deficit in Alzheimer's disease.
引用
收藏
页码:1492 / 1508
页数:17
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