Semantic Priming from Uncued Distractors in Alzheimer's Disease

Research Question: Are semantic impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) partially due to deficits in spatial attention? Methods and Results: In a target detection task, both older adults (OAs) and AD individuals were facilitated by valid spatial cues, but only OAs were impaired by invalid cues compared to neutral. In a reading task, spatial cues validly or invalidly cued the location of pictures, which were related or unrelated to subsequent, centrally presented, words. OAs showed semantic priming only after valid cues, whereas AD individuals showed priming after valid and invalid cues. Discussion: Failure to inhibit uncued locations results in processing of potentially distracting semantic information in AD.