Discourse intervention strategies in Alzheimer's disease: Eye-tracking and the effect of visual cues in conversation

Abstract

ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to investigate whether on-topic visual cues can serve as aids for the maintenance of discourse coherence and informativeness in autobiographical narratives of persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD).MethodsThe experiment consisted of three randomized conversation conditions: one without prompts, showing a blank computer screen; an on-topic condition, showing a picture and a sentence about the conversation; and an off-topic condition, showing a picture and a sentence which were unrelated to the conversation. Speech was recorded while visual attention was examined using eye tracking to measure how long participants looked at cues and the face of the listener.ResultsResults suggest that interventions using visual cues in the form of images and written information are useful to improve discourse informativeness in AD.ConclusionThis study demonstrated the potential of using images and short written messages as means of compensating for the cognitive deficits which underlie uninformative discourse in AD. Future studies should further investigate the efficacy of language interventions based in the use of these compensation strategies for AD patients and their family members and friends.

The Potential of Naturalistic Eye Movement Tasks in the Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review

“…Seven of the included studies analysed eye movement behaviours during static image search tasks [ 38 , 45 , 63 , 65 , 70 , 71 , 72 ]. Interestingly, based on our search, static image search tasks appear to be the most common naturalistic eye movement tasks employed when analysing eye movement behaviours in AD/MCI.…”

“…Brandão et al [ 63 ] analysed eye movements during free recall of an important life event whilst relevant or irrelevant visual cues (images and sentences) were presented. In doing so, Brandão et al [ 63 ] observed that HOC fixated on relevant images longer than irrelevant images, however, this effect was not observed for people with AD.…”

“…Brandão et al [ 63 ] analysed eye movements during free recall of an important life event whilst relevant or irrelevant visual cues (images and sentences) were presented. In doing so, Brandão et al [ 63 ] observed that HOC fixated on relevant images longer than irrelevant images, however, this effect was not observed for people with AD. In general, people with AD fixated their gaze on the screen (as opposed to looking at the experimenters’ face) more when visual cues were present, irrespective of their relevance, hereas HOC attended to the screen more only when the visual cues were relevant.…”

“…Resultantly, 39 papers passed through full-text screening and were identified as being relevant to our research question [ 25 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 ].…”

Eye tracking – The overlooked method to measure cognition in neurodegeneration?

“…Attentional processes and working memory have been studied mostly using the prosaccade and antisaccade task (Crawford et al, 2015;Crawford et al, 2013;Crawford et al, 2017;Crawford & Higham, 2016), but also a variety of other tasks have been used (Brandão et al, 2014;Chau et al, 2015;Chau et al, 2016;Mapstone et al, 2001;Viskontas et al, 2011;Rösler et al, 2000), including reading (Fernández et al, 2016) and finding objects in a natural scene (Dragan et al, 2017). Given the several different cognitive domains affected in AD, ET is potentially a useful tool to further investigate cognition rather than relying only on classic paper and pencil tests.…”