Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes severe impairments in cognitive function but there is evidence that aspects of esthetic perception are somewhat spared, at least in early stages of the disease. People with early Alzheimer’s-related dementia have been found to show similar degrees of stability over time in esthetic judgment of paintings compared to controls, despite poor explicit memory for the images. Here we expand on this line of inquiry to investigate the types of perceptual judgments involved, and to test whether people in later stages of the disease also show evidence of preserved esthetic judgment. Our results confirm that, compared to healthy controls, there is similar esthetic stability in early stage AD in the absence of explicit memory, and we report here that people with later stages of the disease also show similar stability compared to controls. However, while we find that stability for portrait paintings, landscape paintings, and landscape photographs is not different compared to control group performance, stability for face photographs – which were matched for identity with the portrait paintings – was significantly impaired in the AD group. We suggest that partially spared face-processing systems interfere with esthetic processing of natural faces in ways that are not found for artistic images and landscape photographs. Thus, our work provides a novel form of evidence regarding face-processing in healthy and diseased aging. Our work also gives insights into general theories of esthetics, since people with AD are not encumbered by many of the semantic and emotional factors that otherwise color esthetic judgment. We conclude that, for people with AD, basic esthetic judgment of artistic images represents an “island of stability” in a condition that in most other respects causes profound cognitive disruption. As such, esthetic response could be a promising route to future therapies.
Highlights
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has devastating effects on many aspects of cognition including memory (e.g., Parasuraman and Haxby, 1993) and perception (e.g., Cronin-Golomb, 1995) systems
We report that esthetic stability in AD is not different from controls for paintings and photographs of landscapes and paintings of faces, but not for photographs of faces
Our results demonstrate that people with AD have esthetic stability for artistic images mostly like that of healthy older controls, and that this stability is roughly the same for early- and later-stage AD patients
Summary
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has devastating effects on many aspects of cognition including memory (e.g., Parasuraman and Haxby, 1993) and perception (e.g., Cronin-Golomb, 1995) systems. Halpern et al (2008) reported that patients with early-stage AD show essentially the same degree of stability in esthetic judgment of paintings over a 2-week span compared to age-matched controls Patients showed this performance despite performing at chance on an explicit memory test of the images, whereas controls performed well above chance on the explicit memory test. Empirical and neuro-esthetic research is emerging as an important facet of visual perception and cognition Coinciding with this basic research on esthetics, there are increasing attempts to show that interactions with art can lessen the severity of AD symptoms (e.g., Wald, 2003; Eekelaar et al, 2012). Hearthstone Alzheimer’s Care in the United States has a number of long-term care facilities that are explicitly structured around interactions with art and music (http://thehearth.org)
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