Altered motion repulsion in Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Recent research in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) indicates that perceptual impairments may occur before the onset of cognitive declines, and can thus serve as an early noninvasive indicator for AD. In this study, we focused on visual motion processing and explored whether AD induces changes in the properties of direction repulsion between two competing motions. We used random dot kinematograms (RDKs) and measured the magnitudes of direction repulsion between two overlapping RDKs moving different directions in three groups of participants: an AD group, an age-matched old control group, and a young control group. We showed that motion direction repulsion was significantly weaker in AD patients as comparing to both healthy controls. More importantly, we found that the magnitude of motion repulsion was predictive of the assessment of clinical severity in the AD group. Our results implicate that AD pathology is associated with altered neural functions in visual cortical areas and that motion repulsion deficit is a behavioral biomarker for the tracking of AD development.

Afferent and Efferent Visual Markers of Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review and Update in Early Stage Disease

“…AD subjects are also reported to have abnormalities in normal, perceptual illusions involving motion. Normal illusions of direction repulsion, motion-induced position shift, and center-surround suppression of large, high-contrast stimuli have all been significantly changed in AD dementia patients compared to controls (Li et al, 2017 ; Zhuang et al, 2017 ; Ye et al, 2018 ). Direction repulsion is the perception that two stimuli are moving away at a greater angle than reality.…”

“…Motion-induced position shift is the phenomenon where a moving object is perceived to be displaced in the direction of motion, and center-surround suppression is a perceptual phenomenon that causes reduced motion sensitivity of larger stimuli. Increased irregularity on direction repulsion and center-surround suppression tasks correlated with decreased cognitive function as measured by the mini-mental status exam (Li et al, 2017 ; Zhuang et al, 2017 ).…”

Early ultrasonic vocalization deficits and related thyroarytenoid muscle pathology in the transgenic TgF344-AD rat model of Alzheimer’s disease

“…Specifically, some of the earliest communication changes in prodromal AD are characterized by subtle changes to temporal speech parameters in individuals who are clinically unimpaired, but show evidence of abnormal, global β-amyloid and/or tau deposition ( Mueller et al, 2016 , 2018a , b , 2021 ; Mazzon et al, 2019 ; Hajjar et al, 2023 ). Despite recent attention to novel brain ( Jack et al, 2018 ; van Oostveen and de Lange, 2021 ; Ardanaz et al, 2022 ; Uchida, 2022 ; Veitch et al, 2022 ; Leuzy et al, 2022b ), peripheral ( Mantzavinos and Alexiou, 2017 ; Xie et al, 2022 ), and early behavioral biomarkers ( Li et al, 2017 ; Patel and Masurkar, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ; Hussain et al, 2023 ), communication often remains overlooked as a potential target for AD detection.…”

Overconfidence in visual perception in parkinson's disease

“…This becomes more difficult as the percentage of coherently moving dots is decreased. Although this is a classic and well‐established paradigm that has been broadly used to test coherent visual motion perception (Britten et al., 1992; Morgan & Ward, 1980; Rajananda et al., 2018; Shadlen & Newsome, 1996; Williams & Sekuler, 1984), and has also been applied in many clinical populations, such as autism (Milne et al., 2002; Robertson et al., 2012) and Alzheimer's disease (Fernandez & Duffy, 2012; Fernandez et al., 2013; Li et al., 2017; Song & Wang, 2020), surprisingly little is known about RDK performance in PD.…”