Spatial and non-spatial binding in Alzheimer’s disease

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is important because current treatments only provide symptom relief or slow the disease and therefore rely on early diagnosis to be effective. Neuropsychological tests are important in early diagnosis because there is currently no reliable diagnostic test using biomarkers. Previous research has suggested that binding processes in memory might be particularly vulnerable in the early stages of the disease, and therefore useful in diagnosis. The thesis critically reviews this research, and highlights a number of methodological problems and gaps. The thesis then describes a study designed to address some of these issues. Groups of people with Alzheimer’s disease, age-matched healthy controls, and younger people (n=26 in each group) completed six binding tests, along with a battery of other measures. The results suggested that binding tests do provide a promising method for early diagnosis, but that they vary in their effectiveness. The Face-Name and the Paired Associates Learning tests performed best. More research is needed to establish the characteristics of binding tasks that are most vulnerable to the early disease processes. The results provided no evidence to support the claim made in previous literature that spatial binding may be more vulnerable than non-spatial binding.