Evidence for intact selective attention in Alzheimer's disease patients using a location priming task

Researchers examining selective attentional mechanisms in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often report impairment in patients' ability to inhibit irrelevant or distracting information. However, in many studies reporting such failures, researchers used tasks that require semantic processing, which a large body of literature documents to be disrupted in AD. The authors of this study used a spatial location-priming task that minimized semantic processing to examine the phenomena of negative priming and facilitative priming in 13 AD patients and 13 healthy older adults. AD patients demonstrated facilitative and negative priming proportionately equivalent to that of older adults. These findings suggest that both the facilitative and inhibitory mechanisms involved in selective attention are preserved in patients with AD and can be revealed in tasks that minimize semantic processing.