Impact of emotionally negative information on attentional processes in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease
•We conducted an emotional visual search task in healthy adults and patients with AD.•Eye-tracking was used to provide a precise analysis of attentional processes.•Patients with AD are impaired in orienting their attention toward emotional images.•Older adults and patients show a preserved impact of...
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Published in | Brain and cognition Vol. 145; p. 105624 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Elsevier Inc
01.11.2020
Elsevier Science Elsevier |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | •We conducted an emotional visual search task in healthy adults and patients with AD.•Eye-tracking was used to provide a precise analysis of attentional processes.•Patients with AD are impaired in orienting their attention toward emotional images.•Older adults and patients show a preserved impact of emotion on disengagement delays.•Dissociating attentional processes is crucial to studying emotional changes in AD.
Impairments of emotional processing have been reported in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), consistently with the existence of early amygdala atrophy in the pathology. In this study, we hypothesized that patients with AD might show a deficit of orientation toward emotional information under conditions of visual search. Eighteen patients with AD, 24 age-matched controls, and 35 young controls were eye-tracked while they performed a visual search task on a computer screen. The target was a vehicle with implicit (negative or neutral) emotional content, presented concurrently with one, three, or five non-vehicle neutral distractors. The task was to find the target and to report whether a break in the target frame was on the left or on the right side. Both control groups detected negative targets more efficiently than they detected neutral targets, showing facilitated engagement toward negative information. In contrast, patients with AD showed no influence of emotional information on engagement delays. However, all groups reported the frame break location more slowly for negative than for neutral targets (after accounting for the last fixation delay), showing a more difficult disengagement from negative information. These findings are the first to highlight a selective lack of emotional influence on engagement processes in patients with AD. The involvement of amygdala alterations in this behavioral impairment remains to be investigated. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0278-2626 1090-2147 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.bandc.2020.105624 |