Visual Spatial Cognition in Neurodegenerative Disease

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 20:35

Visual spatial impairment is often an early symptom of neurodegenerative diseases including AlzheimerΓÇÖs and ParkinsonΓÇÖs diseases. For example, patients get lost, misplace belongings, or have difficulty parking their cars. This multi-faceted domain of cognition is not well-assessed by most dementia evaluations. Neurodegenerative diseases cause circumscribed atrophy in distinct neural networks, and accordingly, they impact visual spatial cognition in different and characteristic ways. Anatomically-focused visual spatial assessment can assist the clinician in making an early and accurate diagnosis and in monitoring disease progression. In this talk, I will describe how visual spatial cognition is organized in the brain and how it is disrupted by different neurodegenerative diseases, and I will discuss new methods for assessing visual spatial dysfunction including virtual navigation tests. Virtual reality tests of cognition are a promising new avenue in test development because they combine the rigor and control of laboratory measures with the ecological validity of real life situations.