Formation, maintenance and use of top-down knowledge in AD (version 2)

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Formation, maintenance and use of top-down knowledge in Alzheimer Dementia (version 2)

• IRAS ID

  200390

• Contact name

  Moreno I. Coco

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Edinburgh

• Duration of Study in the UK

  2 years, 1 months, 13 days

• Research summary

  Memory is perhaps the cognitive function most strongly affected by aging, especially the case when aging is impaired by neuro-degeneration which causes dementia. Alzheimer Disease (AD) is the most detrimental and widespread of all (1 out 3 seniors suffers from it).

  Studies on visual working memory in AD have mostly focused on low-level visual features (e.g., colour), and utilized arrangement of abstract shapes, which provide virtually no contextual information (e.g., a pen is an objected used to write typically found in office scenes). Contextual information is, however, routinely utilized by our vision to perform a range of tasks, from searching specific objects, to memorize information; as literature on young adults demonstrates.

  In this study, we investigate how contextual information is accessed and used during AD. For contextual information, we simply mean that in a kitchen scene, for example, it is likely to see plates and cutleries, but not toothpaste or toothbrushes. In two different tasks, participants, and healthy-age matched control will be asked to watch photo-realistic scenes while their eye-movement and electro-physiological responses (EEG) will be simultaneously recorded.

  The theoretical objective of this study is to understand how attention (eye-movement responses), and associated brain-activity (EEG responses) can tell us something about memory formation for images, and about their likelihood to be successfully recalled from memory. Our interest is to compare the responses obtained on the AD participants with age-matched healthy control, and hence establish whether, and to what extent, populations would differ. Ethical approval for the healthy age-matched control group has been obtained from the Psychology Research Ethics Committee (PREC) of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the Edinburgh University (application number 204-1415/7, approved on 09-02-2016, relevant documents uploaded with this application). As we do not need to seek for approval from REC on this group, it will not be further discussed.

  Participants will be tested using eye-tracking, as well, as electrophysiology. We simultaneously record these two responses to uncover the links between attention, i.e., the eye-movement responses, and memory, i.e., the brain activity observed as the eye-movement are made.

  The research is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

• REC name

  West of Scotland REC 5

• REC reference

  16/WS/0067

• Date of REC Opinion

  22 Mar 2016

• REC opinion

  Unfavourable Opinion