Spatial naming deficits in mild Alzheimer’s disease: Abstracts Presented at the International Neuropsychological Society 2020 Virtual Event

Objective: While impairments in visuospatial cognition among patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are well documented, little is known about their ability to communicate spatial information with verbal means. The present study investigated potential category-specific deficits in spatial naming in mild AD.
Participants and Methods: Seventeen patients with mild AD and 21 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls were administered tests assessing object, action, and spatial naming abilities.
Results: While AD patients performed poorer than healthy controls across all naming tasks, naming deficits in mild AD varied as a function of the category involved, with greater impairments in naming spatial relations compared to object and action naming. Binary logistic regression models and ROC curves of sensitivity and specificity also revealed that spatial naming held a higher level of diagnostic accuracy and discriminative power for AD diagnosis compared to object and action naming.
Conclusions: Findings point to differential category-dependent effects on naming deficits in mild AD, with far larger deficits in naming spatial relations compared to objects and actions. Implications for early cognitive markers of the disease and our theoretical understanding of spatial cognition are discussed.