Tippett William J, Krajewski Adam, Sergio Lauren E
School of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University, Toronto, Ont., Canada.
Eur Neurol. 2007;58(1):1-11. doi: 10.1159/000102160. Epub 2007 May 4.
This study examined the ability of neurologically healthy individuals and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to successfully complete procedures involving short-term spatial visuomotor memory tasks, and tasks involving increasingly complex visuomotor transformations. Participants made sliding finger movements over a clear touch-sensitive screen on two separate spatial planes (vertical and horizontal), to visually constant and remembered target positions. Significant main effects were observed between participant groups on reaction time and movement time measures. As well, significant changes in reaction time and movement time were observed within the patient group over the different of any experimental procedures. In addition, as task increased in complexity significant increases in errors were observed in the AD group. Overall, the results reveal that AD patients show substantial declines in their ability to process and integrate visual information to produce motor responses. Therefore, we believe that this psychophysical research provides further evidence that AD, even early stages of AD, can affect anatomical regions supporting vision for action.
本研究考察了神经功能健康的个体以及患有阿尔茨海默病（AD）的个体成功完成涉及短期空间视觉运动记忆任务和涉及日益复杂的视觉运动转换任务的能力。参与者在两个独立的空间平面（垂直和水平）上的清晰触敏屏幕上进行滑动手指动作，以指向视觉上恒定且记忆中的目标位置。在反应时间和运动时间测量方面，观察到参与者组之间存在显著的主效应。此外，在患者组中，随着任何实验程序的不同，反应时间和运动时间也出现了显著变化。此外，随着任务复杂性的增加，AD组的错误显著增加。总体而言，结果表明AD患者在处理和整合视觉信息以产生运动反应的能力方面大幅下降。因此，我们认为这项心理物理学研究进一步证明，AD，即使是AD的早期阶段，也会影响支持视觉行动的解剖区域。
