13:30 - 15:00
Tue-B16-Talk V-
Tue-Talk V-
Room: B16
Chair/s:
Jan Tünnermann, Adriana L Ruiz-Rizzo, Ingrid Scharlau
Bundesen’s Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) has been around for approximately half a century. Its basic idea is that visual perception is biased competition of visual categorizations that race visual short-term memory. The biases stem from attentional and perceptual influences. TVA links observable data to theoretical concepts with mathematical rigor and helps to explain phenomena with quantitatively precise concepts. Progress in TVA might not be fast, but it is continuous and robust. This symposium covers recent developments in topics of basic and applied research. In the first session, Scharlau & Tünnermann survey recent advances with new stimuli and recording
settings. Connecting to this, Biermeier & Scharlau investigate attention capacity in mixed-reality settings. Poth & Schneider disentangle the speed of location and object processing. Tünnermann et al. show how simulations of visual foraging depend on dynamically adjusting spatial attention, and Blurton et al. discuss improvements in modeling cognitive control. The second session focuses on recent applications of TVA in clinical contexts: Ruiz-Rizzo et al. present the relationship between visual processing speed and cognitive complaints in older adults. Kattlun et al. investigate the role of visual-short-term memory in cognitive deficits of patients who survived severe sepsis. Martin et
al. demonstrate how fatigue relates to visual processing speed and pupillary unrest in post-COVID patients. Srowig et al. close by showing how visual short-term memory is associated with neuropsychological performance in patients at a high-risk for dementia.
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Visual short-term memory and neuropsychological test results in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment
Tue-B16-Talk V-04
Presented by: Annie Srowig
Annie Srowig 1, Marleen Haupt 2, Stefan Brodoehl 1, Matthias Schwab 1, Kathrin Finke 1
1 Department of Neurology, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany, 2 Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) are at increased risk for further cognitive decline and development of Alzheimer’s dementia. Recent studies using psychophysical paradigms of whole report based on the theory of visual attention (TVA; Bundesen, 1990) suggest that, in addition to episodic longterm memory deficits, aMCI patients also show a reduced visual short-term memory (VSTM) capacity. That is, the maximum number of elements they can represented in VSTM in a given instant is reduced compared to healthy older adults.

The present study aims to evaluate whether and which of the early neurocognitive symptoms shown by patients with aMCI in the established neuropsychological CERAD+ (Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease) can be explained by such VSTM capacity reduction.

Patients with aMCI diagnosis were recruited at the Jena University Hospital Memory Center. They underwent a TVA-based whole report assessment delivering quantitative estimates of VSTM capacity. Partial correlation and regression analyses revealed that VSTM capacity is related to and can predict neuropsychological symptoms in aMCI patients.
Keywords: Visual Short-Term Memory Capacity, Visual Attention, aMCI, Neuro-cognitive biomarkers, Theory of Visual Attention, Neuropsychology, Computational Modelling
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