SPATIALOS · Attentional Control and Mapping in Spatial Navigation: Defining Behavioral Fingerprints for Early Alzheimer’s Risk Detection

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Project objective

Memory dysfunction is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Notably, spatial memory deficits are a key precursor for detecting AD pathophysiology before clinical symptoms emerge, where growing evidence shows that spatial memory deficits precede detection of other long-term memory deficits by years. Selective attention, a key element of navigation, is affected by AD since people preferentially process some aspects of the environment at the expense of others. When multiple landmarks can be used to find a goal, the most salient ones can constrain learning about the others. This is known as Overshadowing (OS). However, little is known about the impact of OS on people who are asymptomatic but at risk of developing AD. I will leverage a robust OS-sensitive navigation task to discriminate individual differences in how young adults (YA) at risk of AD and older adults (OA) with and without MCI overcome interference between different attentional cues to define distinct behavioral fingerprints involving OS by stratifying individuals along the cognitive decline continuum based on attention x memory interactions. I will also determine the neural basis of OS in YA. Three main research objectives (RO) are pursued: RO1) Study OS in attention and memory to define the behavioral phenotypes of 18-40 yo YA at risk of AD (i.e., APOE-ε4), and non-APOE-ε4 YA as a control group (CG). RO2) Assess how attentional and memory neural networks engage in the OS task in healthy 18-40 yo YA without APOE designation (fMRI study). I will later assess if I can tease apart distinct behavioral phenotypes in OS that map onto the at risk and CG. RO3) Define the behavioral phenotypes of healthy OA and MCI participants (60 yo or older). Finally, I will study how their behavioral performance vary along the cognitive decline continuum. This multidisciplinary project will have an impact on the understanding of interindividual variability of OS in navigation for early detection of AD pathophysiology.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITAT JAUME I DE CASTELLON · Castellon De La PlanaCoordinatorSpain

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101279614