Affiliations: [a] Laboratoire d’Anthropologie et de Psychologie Cliniques, Cognitives et Sociales, Université Côte d’Azur, France
| [b] School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, UK
| [c] Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, UK
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: Hanane Ramzaoui, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie et de Psychologie Cliniques, Cognitives et Sociales (LAPCOS), Université Côte d’Azur, Campus Saint Jean d’Angély/MSHS Sud-Est, 3 Boulevard François Mitterrand, 06357 Nice Cedex 4, France. Tel.:+33768517475; E-mail: hramzaoui@unice.fr.
Abstract: Many instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), like cooking and managing finances and medications, involve finding efficiently and in a timely manner one or several objects within complex environments. They may thus be disrupted by visual search deficits. These deficits, present in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from its early stages, arise from impairments in multiple attentional and memory mechanisms. A growing body of research on visual search in AD has examined several factors underlying search impairments in simple arrays. Little is known about how AD patients search in real-world scenes and in real settings, and about how such impairments affect patients’ functional autonomy. Here, we review studies on visuospatial attention and visual search in AD. We then consider why analysis of patients’ oculomotor behavior is promising to improve understanding of the specific search deficits in AD, and of their role in impairing IADL performance. We also highlight why paradigms developed in research on real-world scenes and real settings in healthy individuals are valuable to investigate visual search in AD. Finally, we indicate future research directions that may offer new insights to improve visual search abilities and autonomy in AD patients.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, eye movements, Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, memory, real-world settings, scene processing, visual search, visuospatial attention
