Most people know that there are extreme cognitive deficits associated with DAT, otherwise known as Alzheimer \u2019s disease, but what is the nature of these struggles? What do those with DAT have the most trouble on, and what is the biggest cause of the troubles? It turns out that those with DAT have the biggest deficits in attentional tasks, and a lot of their memory issues stem from an inability to focus and maintain attention. In 1998 \u201cSentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer\u2019s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line VS. On-Line Sentence Processing\u201d looked at and tried to analyze the reasons behind memory deficits in DAT individuals.<\/p>\n
The experimenters wanted to test whether the problems were stemming from a lack of syntactic knowledge, or the knowledge of how words form into sentences correctly, or from a working memory deficit. Working memory is the system that holds information in short term memory, deciding whether to attend to it, rehearse it, and transfer it into long term memory or to just throw it out. The better a person\u2019s working memory, the better they can learn and pay attention to what they are looking at. They decided to test this idea through the use of on-line and off-line tasks. On-line tasks are when the participant is only doing one thing, in this case simply deciding whether the sentence was grammatically correct, as quickly and accurately as possible. Off-line tasks are the same, except that the participant has to do two things at once. They must also name the word while deciding whether the sentence it is in is grammatically correct. This requires a lot of working memory ability to switch attention between these two tasks and do both well. If the DAT older adults did significantly worse than normal older adults on the simple on-line task and also on the complex off-line task then that would mean they were having a lot of trouble with syntactic knowledge; they can\u2019t figure out what the heck the sentence means even when they aren\u2019t distracted. If, on the other hand, they only perform poorly on the complex off-line task it means that they do not have trouble with syntactic knowledge, they can figure out the sentence fine. Instead this means that DAT subjects are having a difficult time focusing their attention and doing both tasks when compared to the healthy older adults.<\/p>\n
They found strong evidence of working memory difficulties in the DAT individuals. They had no noticeable difficulties on the simple on-line task, but when required to do two things at once they fell apart, often so focused on one aspect of the test that they could not do the other at all. This makes a lot of sense when looking at Alzheimer\u2019s research. Attentional deficits are prominent, often showing up long before any memory difficulties. One longitudinal study looked at the Stroop Task, a test where a person is presented with words in various colors. They must say the color and not the word, simple right? Except that on 1\/3 of the tests the word is the same as the color, i.e. \u201cBLUE\u201d is presented in blue (congruent trials), on one third they are different, i.e. \u201cBLUE\u201d is presented in green (incongruent), and on one third they are unrelated, i.e. \u201cBIRD\u201d is presented in red (unrelated). People read things automatically, and so it is often extremely difficult to say the color of the word when the word itself is a different color (incongruent trials). This is a good test of attentional control. Many participants in this study took the Stroop Task, some of them had DAT and some were healthy, and they found that in general those with DAT had extreme difficulty on incongruent trials, showing breakdowns in attentional control. The most interesting part, however, is that years later they went back and found all of the participants. Many of the healthy group had developed DAT. When they went back and looked at their Stroop Task results from the original experiment the results looked exactly the same as those in the DAT group. They were showing the exact same detriments in attention years before they showed any outward signs of DAT at all.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kempler, D., Almor A., Tyler, L.K., Andersen, E.S., MacDonald, M.C.. Sentence <\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer\u2019s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line VS. On-Line <\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sentence Processing. <\/i>Brain and Language. 64 (1998).<\/p>\n
David A. Balota et al. Predicting Conversion to Dementia of the Alzheimer\u2019s Type in a Healthy<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Control Sample: The Power of Errors in Stroop Color Naming. <\/i>Psychology and Aging<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 25(1) (2010).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most people know that there are extreme cognitive deficits associated with DAT, otherwise known as Alzheimer \u2019s disease, but what is the nature of these struggles? What do those with DAT have the most trouble on, and what is the biggest cause of the troubles? It turns out that those with DAT have the biggest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40864,80216,80217,80215],"tags":[43341,149745,272,130377],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":854,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}