title: Cognitive decline effects at an early stage: evidence from N170 and VPP.
abstract: The perceptual processing of faces was studied using event-related potentials (ERPs) in 12 elderly patients with cognitive impairment, 15 elderly adults and 16 young adults in order to explore the sensitivity of N170/VPP to the cognitive decline associated to Alzheimer's disease. Famous and unknown faces were presented in a familiarity categorization task. Eight patients and 11 elderly adults repeated this task to obtain longitudinal data. Topographical effects were analyzed using PCA. The posterior N170 showed reduced amplitude in patients with cognitive impairment and elderly adults, compared to young adults, which could indicate perceptual impairment in configural face-encoding processing. The anterior VPP showed enhanced amplitude in patients with cognitive impairment, compared to young and elderly adults, which might relate to the prefrontal dysfunction associated to mild dementia. These preliminary findings suggest that N170/VPP could be modulated by the decline related to pathological cognitive aging.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicología Biológica y de la Salud, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. cristina.saavedra@uam.es
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Saavedra
authors.forename: Ela I
authors.initials: EI
authors.lastname: Olivares
authors.forename: Jaime
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Iglesias
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D060825:Cognitive Dysfunction / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D006801:Humans; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*