Visual Processing Speed in the Aging Brain

Presentation for Ph.D. Thesis Defense Abstract - Ph.D. Dissertation Either reading a text in the office or looking for an apple in the supermarket, we are continuously flooded with visual stimuli. But how does the human brain support the efficient processing of those stimuli? And, if pathological changes occur in the brain, how do these changes lead to reductions in such efficient processing? In the present dissertation, aging is used as a model to address these two questions. First, individual differences in visual processing speed are examined in association with the coherence of the brain’s spontaneous activity and how this coherence is affected by normal aging. Second, individual differences in visual processing speed are studied in association with behavior in tasks that measure complex visual object perception in patients at risk of Alzheimer’s dementia and healthy aging adults. Based on these two approaches, evidence will be presented for an association of a slowed visual processing with (a) decreased coherent activity of a frontoinsular network in healthy aging and (b) simultaneous object perception deficits in patients at risk of Alzheimer’s dementia. This evidence provides critical insights into the particular link between visual processing speed and the coherence of the brain’s spontaneous activity and reveals perceptual deficits in patients whose clinically most apparent impairments lie in memory