Eye Movements in Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

A growing body of literature has investigated changes in eye movements as a result of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). When compared to healthy, age-matched controls, patients display a number of remarkable alterations to oculomotor function and viewing behavior. In this article, we review AD-related changes to fundamental eye movements, such as saccades and smooth pursuit motion, in addition to changes to eye movement patterns during more complex tasks like visual search and scene exploration. We discuss the cognitive mechanisms that underlie these changes and consider the clinical significance of eye movement behavior, with a focus on eye movements in mild cognitive impairment. We conclude with directions for future research.

The Potential Utility of Eye Movements in the Detection and Characterization of Everyday Functional Difficulties in Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…Consistent with this, a recent review on eye movements in AD concluded that some of the basic oculomotor changes associated with AD are present in MCI and that eye movements may be useful in detecting the early stages of memory impairment (Molitor et al 2015). However, these studies predominantly addressed a single domain of cognitive dysfunction (e.g., episodic memory or executive function), most included an exclusively amnestic MCI population (i.e., aMCI), and none examined these processes during completion of everyday tasks, which are subtly compromised in MCI but have been shown to be strongly associated with conversion to dementia.…”

“…We further maintain that the examination of visual behaviors in MCI during everyday task performance is a critical future step in characterizing the changes during this stage that may be most relevant for prognosis and intervention. Findings from studies thus far exploring specific visual behaviors in MCI will be described in this section (see also Molitor et al 2015;Pereira et al 2014). …”

On the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease from multimodal signals: A survey

“…In order to verify this hypothesis, eye movements of AD patients have been compared to those of healthy subjects in many studies and effectively, it has been proven that AD patients suffer from changes in oculomotor and pupillary functions [217]. More precisely, changes in saccades, smooth pursuit function and in the pupillary response have been found by some researchers.…”

Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis

“…New findings also show a great potential to increase our understanding of dementia and its impact on linguistic degradation such as loss of vocabulary, syntactic simplification, poor speech content and semantic generalization. Analysis of eye movement is also a relevant research technology to apply, and text reading by people with and without mild cognitive impairment may give a clear ruling on how reading strategies differ between these groups, an area that has so far not been researched to any significant extent in this particular domain (Fernández et al, 2013(Fernández et al, , 2014Molitor et al, 2015). With the help of eye-tracking technology the eye movements of participants are recorded while suitable stimuli is presented (e.g., a short text; cf.…”

“…For instance, the longer the eye gaze fixation is on a certain word, the more difficult the word is for cognitive processing, therefore the durations of gaze fixations could be used as a proxy for measuring cognitive load (Just & Carpenter, 1980). Molitor et al (2015) provide a recent review on the growing body of literature that investigates changes in eye movements as a result of AD and the alterations to oculomotor function and viewing behavior. …”