title: Learning to predict is spared in mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: Learning the statistics of the environment is critical for predicting upcoming events. However, little is known about how we translate previous knowledge about scene regularities to sensory predictions. Here, we ask whether patients with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease (MCI-AD) that are known to have spared implicit but impaired explicit recognition memory are able to learn temporal regularities and predict upcoming events. We tested the ability of MCI-AD patients and age-matched controls to predict the orientation of a test stimulus following exposure to sequences of leftwards or rightwards oriented gratings. Our results demonstrate that exposure to temporal sequences without feedback facilitates the ability to predict an upcoming stimulus in both MCI-AD patients and controls. Further, we show that executive cognitive control may account for individual variability in predictive learning. That is, we observed significant positive correlations of performance in attentional and working memory tasks with post-training performance in the prediction task. Taken together, these results suggest a mediating role of circuits involved in cognitive control (i.e. frontal circuits) that may support the ability for predictive learning in MCI-AD.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
authors.forename: Rosalind
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.affiliation: Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust (BSMHFT), Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bentham
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. zk240@cam.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Zoe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Kourtzi
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology*; D059031:Anticipation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D060825:Cognitive Dysfunction / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology
keywords: Attention; Memory; Sensory predictions; Sequence learning