Measures of eye movements during reading could inform about problems in Alzheimer disease for using stored information.

FERNANDEZ GERARDO; SCHUMACHER MARCELA; MANDOLESI PABLO; COLOMBO OSCAR; CASTRO LILIANA; AGAMENNONI OSVALDO

Lund

Congreso; 17th European Conference on Eye Movements; 2013

Lund University

Studies measuring how patients with probable Alzheimer disease process well defined words in high and low predictability sentences are, at our knowledge, inexistent. In the present study we examined eye movement behavior during reading of 18 AD versus 40 age-matched Control using the eyetracking technique. Independently of what kind of sentence they were reading, AD did not report a differentiated processing relating to upcoming words; it seems that predictability context did not exert its influence on fixation duration. Quite the contrary, incoming word predictions influenced fixation duration in Control and as consequence they showed a well differentiated word processing during reading high predictability sentences. In AD, visual exploration was less focused; fixations were much longer and saccade amplitudes intra words were smaller than in Control. Our results suggest that the altered visual exploration and the absence of word predictability effects might be related to impairments in working memory, memory retrieval, and semantic memory functions. These eye movement measures demonstrate considerable sensitivity with respect to evaluating cognitive processes in a very early stage of AD.