Visual mental imagery in mild cognitive impairment: A pilot study

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundVisual Mental Imagery (VMI), the ability of seeing with the mind eyes, has shown to be related with autobiographical memory deficits inAlzheimer's disease (AD) (El Haj et al., 2019). Hippocampus, affected by AD neuropathology since early stages, plays a pivotal contribution to the recollection of previous memories in service of VMI; however, little is known about VMI in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Basing on the current model of VMI and findings that the various processes and contents of VMI decline differently in physiological ageing (Piccardi et al. 2015), we investigated whether VMI is involved by MCI analyzing which processes and specific contents are compromised to evaluate the possible role of deficit in VMI as early neuropsychological marker of dementia.MethodTwelve amnestic‐MCI patients (mean age = 75.42, SD = 5.68; mean education=10.92, SD=4.17) and eleven healthy controls (HC) (mean age = 71.09, DS = 8.40; mean education = 13.18, SD = 4.64), matched for Age and Education, were enrolled. VMI was extensively assessed in all patients and controls by means of 1) an adapted version of The Complete Visual Mental Imagery Battery (CVMIB; Palermo et al., 2016), including tasks evaluating the generation, maintenance, inspection and transformation of different types of visual mental images (i.e. objects, buildings and faces), and 2) the O’Clock test (Grossi et al.,1994) that allows to disentangle the possible role of perceptive difficulties in the VMI task’s performance.ResultParametric and non‐parametric analyses revealed that MCI performed worse than HC in all CVMIB’s tasks except transformation (i.e. Mental Rotation and Folding tasks) and for the generation of VMI of faces. VMI deficits seem not attributable to perceptual difficulties due to the absence of deficits in the Perceptive task of the O’Clock Test (see Figure 1).ConclusionPresent preliminary results suggest that VMI is impaired since the early phase of cognitive decline and an extensive assessment of VMI, taking into account the different components and contents of VMI, may be used to better characterize MCI neuropsychological profile as well as early neuropsychological marker of dementia.