Why people with Alzheimer's stop recognizing their loved ones

  • A finding that Alzheimer's sufferers' failure to recognize familiar faces is rooted in an impairment in holistic perception rather than memory loss, suggests new strategies to help patients recognize their loved ones for longer.

People with Alzheimer's disease develop problems in recognizing familiar faces. It has been thought that this is just part of their general impairment, but a new study indicates that a specific, face-related impairment develops early in the disease. This impairment has to do with the recognition of a face as a whole.

Face recognition has two aspects to it: holistic (seeing the face as a whole) and featural (processing individual features of the face). While both are useful in object recognition, expert recognition (and face recognition is usually something humans are expert in) is built on a shift from featural to holistic processing.

The study compared the ability of people with mild Alzheimer's and healthy age- and education-matched seniors to recognize faces and cars in photos that were either upright or upside down. It found that those with Alzheimer's performed comparably to the control group in processing the upside-down faces and cars. This type of processing requires an analysis of the various features. Those with Alzheimer’s also performed normally in recognizing upright cars (car experts are likely to use holistic processing, but those with less expertise will depend more on featural processing). However, they were much slower and less accurate in recognizing faces.

Realizing that impaired facial recognition is based on a holistic perception problem, rather than being simply another failure of memory, suggests that strategies such as focusing on particular facial features or on voice recognition may help patients recognize their loved ones for longer.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/uom-wdp040816.php

Reference: 

Related News

In the first mouse study, when young and old mice were conjoined, allowing blood to flow between the two, the young mice showed a decrease in

In a small study, 266 older adults with mild cognitive impairment (aged 70+) received a daily dose of 0.8 mg folic acid, 0.5 mg vitamin B12 and 20 mg vitamin B6 or a placebo for two years.

Comparison of 99 chimpanzee brains ranging from 10-51 years of age with 87 human brains ranging from 22-88 years of age has revealed that, unlike the humans, chimpanzee brains showed no sign of shrinkage with age. But the answer may be simple: we live much longer.

A study involving 105 people with Alzheimer's disease and 125 healthy older adults has compared cognitive function and brain shrinkage in those aged 60-75 and those aged 80+.

A three-year study following 1,262 healthy older Canadians (aged 67-84) has found that, among those who exercised little, those who had high-salt diets showed significantly greater cognitive decline.

In my book on remembering what you’re doing and what you intend to do, I briefly discuss the popular strategy of asking someone to remind you (basically, whether it’s an effective strategy depends on several factors, of which the most important is the reliability of the person doing the remindin

A study comparing activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in young, middle-aged and aged m

Dietary changes affect levels of biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's

Sleep apnea linked to later dementia

A study involving 298 older women with sleep problems found that those who had disordered breathing (such as sleep apnea) were significantly more likely to develop dementia or mild cognitive impairment.

Functional impairment good indicator of mild cognitive impairment

Pages

Subscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest health newsSubscribe to Latest news
Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.