Department of Psychiatry, Nihon University School of Medicine, 30-1 Oyaguchi-kamicho, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Department of Psychiatry, Nihon University School of Medicine, 30-1 Oyaguchi-kamicho, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Neurosci Res. 2021 Oct;171:62-66. doi: 10.1016/j.neures.2021.03.007. Epub 2021 Mar 27.
Visual exploration disturbance has been examined in the elderly, mainly from the perspective of associations with cognitive function. However, it remains unknown whether this is a consequence of cognitive decline, age-related changes independent of cognitive decline, or both. In this study, 15 healthy elderly individuals were evaluated using two figure-matching tasks representing visual information processing (clock-matching and inverted clock-matching tasks). Cognitive functions were evaluated for each subject using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Infrared eye-movement assessments were used to analyze eye movements during task performance. Behavioral analyses showed that age was associated with longer reaction time, while MMSE score was associated with higher accuracy on the inverted clock-matching task. Analyses of eye-movement parameters showed that MMSE score was negatively associated with a parameter indicating difficulty in the efficiency of visual exploration planning, while age was tended to be positively associated with the sum of saccade times in each trial, both predominantly on the inverted clock-matching task. Our approaches highlighted that age and cognitive decline are separately associated with eye-movement characteristics: cognitive decline is associated with difficulty in visual exploration planning, particularly in situations that require substantial visual working memory resources, whereas aging may be associated with oculomotor dysfunction.
视觉探索障碍在老年人中已经得到了研究，主要从与认知功能的关联角度进行探讨。然而，目前尚不清楚这是认知能力下降的结果，还是与认知能力下降无关的年龄相关变化，或者两者兼而有之。在这项研究中，我们使用两种代表视觉信息处理的图形匹配任务（时钟匹配和倒置时钟匹配任务）评估了 15 名健康的老年人。我们使用简易精神状态检查（MMSE）对每位受试者的认知功能进行了评估。我们使用红外眼动评估来分析任务执行过程中的眼动。行为分析表明，年龄与反应时间延长有关，而 MMSE 评分与倒置时钟匹配任务的准确性更高有关。眼动参数分析表明，MMSE 评分与一个表示视觉探索规划效率困难的参数呈负相关，而年龄与每个试验中的扫视时间总和呈正相关，这两种趋势在倒置时钟匹配任务中更为明显。我们的方法强调了年龄和认知能力下降与眼动特征的分离关联：认知能力下降与视觉探索规划的困难有关，特别是在需要大量视觉工作记忆资源的情况下，而衰老可能与眼球运动功能障碍有关。
