Selective attention impairments in Alzheimer's disease: evidence for dissociable components

Tasks emphasizing 3 different aspects of selective attention-inhibition, visuospatial selective attention, and decision making-were administered to subjects with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to healthy elderly control (HEC) subjects to determine which components of selective attention were impaired in AD subjects and whether selective attention could be dissociated into different components. The tasks were administered with easy versus hard levels of difficulty to assess proportional slowing as the key variable across tasks. The results indicated that the inhibitory and visual search tasks showed greater proportional slowing in subjects with AD than in HEC subjects, and that the task involving inhibition was significantly more affected in subjects with AD. Furthermore, there were no significant intertask correlations, and the results cannot be explained simply in terms of generalized cognitive slowing. These results provide evidence that inhibition is the most strikingly affected aspect of selective attention that is observed to be impaired in early stages of AD.