Change of Visual Perceptions in Taiwan’s Aged People with Mild Dementia Caused by the Textures of Building Materials

Abstract

People with dementia can be overstimulated by too many patterns and designs in one space. The purpose of this research was to find the visual perceptions’ changing of the demented elderly related to the textures of building materials, and to inspect what kind of texture might have the possibility of causing demented elders to have visual hallucinations. A total of ten male subjects with mild dementia participated in this experiment. The simulation of visual perception was made using a highly sensitive LCD projector that showed pictures of building materials on a screen. Clock Drawing Test (CDT) was applied to assess the visual perceptions’ changing of the subjects before and after simulation. Based on the results of this experiment, the visual perceptions of the subjects were more changed by character textures and textures of regular shapes than by the other typologies of textures. Some of the subjects have the possibility of visual hallucinations while looking at the textures during the experiment, because they described visual images that did not exist. Data about these building materials can be made available for the reference of building managers and designers, in order to prevent the demented elderly from having behavior problems.