Development of a paradigm to investigate mechanisms of divided and selective attention impairment in the rodent models of Alzheimer’s disease

Excerpt

In Alzheimer’s disease impaired attention can be detected almost immediately after the first signs of memory loss and is considered to be a major cause of difficulties in the patients everyday life in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Several types of attention are recognized such as divided, selective and sustained attention. Selective and divided attention are impaired most in the Alzheimer’s disease patients while sustained attention remains relatively intact. However, most attention tests in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease such as the five-choice serial reaction time task evaluates sustained but not other attention types. We decided to profit from a recent finding that Alzheimer’s patients have an impaired ability to detect objects approaching on a collision course in tests for selective and divided visual attention [1, 2]. Collision detection is conserved across species and is performed by specialized collision-sensitive neurons in the superior colliculus of both in humans and rodents facilitating extension to humans of the results obtained in animals. …