Álvarez-San Millán Andrea, Iglesias Jaime, Gutkin Anahí, Olivares Ela I
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Department of Biological and Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2022 Sep 20;14:893818. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.893818. eCollection 2022.
In the perception of Navon hierarchical stimuli (e.g., large letters made up of small letters), young adults identify large letters faster than small ones (known as 'global advantage') and identify more slowly small letters when they form a different (or incongruent) large letter (known as 'unidirectional global interference'). Since some global/local perceptual alterations might be occurring with aging, we investigated whether these effects vary across healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Here, the Navon letter task was administered to 26 healthy elderly (HE), 21 adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 26 adults with AD. The same task was administered 1 year later, and different neuropsychological variables were incorporated into the analyses. The cross-sectional study revealed no global advantage but did reveal both global and local interferences in all groups when response times were analyzed. Regarding discrimination sensitivity, HE showed unidirectional global interference, while AD displayed better discrimination of local than global letters in the incongruent condition, which denotes less interference by global distractors than by local ones. The longitudinal study revealed that 1 year later the participants with MCI showed a slowdown in inhibiting local distractors in the global task, revealing a certain bias toward focus in their attention on small stimuli. The elders with AD reflected a generalized slowing of their responses with a clear bias toward local analysis of stimuli, also suggested by their better discrimination in the incongruent local task at the second moment of assessment. Furthermore, all response timing measures in the Navon task were correlated with several neuropsychological indexes of highly sensitive neuropsychological tests, suggesting that performance in this task may also have a potential diagnostic value for differentiating typical from atypical cognitive aging. All these results support the need for a multidomain approach to define neuropsychological markers of progression toward AD, including visual perceptual organization evaluated measures of performance quality.
在对纳冯层级刺激（例如由小字母组成的大字母）的感知中，年轻人识别大字母比识别小字母更快（即“整体优势”），并且当小字母组成不同（或不一致）的大字母时，识别小字母的速度更慢（即“单向整体干扰”）。由于随着年龄增长可能会出现一些整体/局部感知变化，我们研究了这些效应在健康老龄化和阿尔茨海默病（AD）中是否有所不同。在此，对26名健康老年人（HE）、21名轻度认知障碍（MCI）成年人和26名AD成年人进行了纳冯字母任务测试。一年后再次进行相同任务，并将不同的神经心理学变量纳入分析。横断面研究未发现整体优势，但在分析反应时间时发现所有组均存在整体和局部干扰。关于辨别敏感性，HE表现出单向整体干扰，而AD在不一致条件下对局部字母的辨别优于整体字母，这表明整体干扰物比局部干扰物的干扰更小。纵向研究表明，一年后，MCI参与者在整体任务中抑制局部干扰物的速度减慢，这表明他们在注意力上对小刺激存在一定的聚焦偏向。AD老年人反应普遍变慢，且对刺激的局部分析有明显偏向，这也体现在他们在第二次评估时在不一致局部任务中的更好辨别能力上。此外，纳冯任务中的所有反应时间测量指标均与高度敏感的神经心理学测试的几个神经心理学指标相关，这表明该任务的表现对于区分典型与非典型认知老化可能也具有潜在的诊断价值。所有这些结果都支持需要采用多领域方法来定义向AD进展的神经心理学标志物，包括评估视觉感知组织 性能质量的指标。
