Alzheimer’s disease and the processing of uncertainty during choice task performance: Executive dysfunction within the Hick–Hyman law

ABSTRACT

The Hick–Hyman law states that choice response time (RT) increases linearly with increasing information uncertainty. Neuroimaging studies suggest that the representation of uncertainty in support of response generation is mediated by the cognitive control network (CCN), which is disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Thus, we predicted that patients with AD would be sensitive to increased uncertainty particularly under conditions that place demands on the internal representation of uncertainty, and that choice RT performance under these conditions would be associated with performance on tests of executive function. Cognitively normal older adults (CN) and patients with AD completed card-sorting tasks that separately manipulated either externally cued uncertainty (i.e., number of sorting piles with a fixed probability of each stimulus type) or more internally driven uncertainty (i.e., the probability of each stimulus type with a fixed number of sorting piles). Consistent with our predictions, AD patients were impaired relative to CN particularly on the internally driven uncertainty task, and RT in this task was associated with performance on neuropsychological measures of executive functioning but not episodic memory. We suggest that this pattern of findings is consistent with presumed disruptions to the CCN in AD and provides neuropsychological evidence in support of the role of the CCN in the representation of uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Choice reaction time
• cognition
• dementia
• executive function
• uncertainty

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants and staff of the Shiley–Marcos Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California, San Diego.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center National Institutes of Health (NIH) AG05131]; and the Helen A. Jarrett Chair for Alzheimer’s Disease Research.