Researchers from the University of Rome in Italy found that Alzheimer’s patients have a distorted perception of time. results published In Scientific Reports.
The study included 13 people with Alzheimer’s disease, 17 people with subjective cognitive decline, 16 people with mild cognitive impairment, and 17 healthy volunteers. All study participants were between the ages of 55 and 86. In the experiment, subjects had to watch a series of short videos showing a red ball bouncing around in a transparent container and then jumping out after a while.
Participants had to watch the video six times and, for the seventh time, press a button at the expected moment when the ball would fly out of the container. It is noted that the ball always jumps out of the cup after a fixed time interval, and the number of times it rebounds from the bottom of the cup before jumping varies.
It turns out that people with cognitive impairment and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease have difficulty completing the task. They made more errors than the control group when determining when the ball would leave the cup. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease performed worst on this task.
Scientists explained that these results were due to impaired time perception and a decrease in the ability to reproduce chronological order in people with cognitive impairment. This is due to the disorders caused by Alzheimer’s disease in the hippocampus. Scientists hope that their discovery will be the first step in the development of new methods for diagnosing this disease based on assessing time perception.
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