Visual spatial cognition in neurodegenerative disease

Abstract

Visual spatial impairment is often an early symptom of neurodegenerative disease; however, this multi-faceted domain of cognition is not well-assessed by most typical dementia evaluations. Neurodegenerative diseases cause circumscribed atrophy in distinct neural networks, and accordingly, they impact visual spatial cognition in different and characteristic ways. Anatomically-focused visual spatial assessment can assist the clinician in making an early and accurate diagnosis. This article will review the literature on visual spatial cognition in neurodegenerative disease clinical syndromes, and where research is available, by neuropathologic diagnoses. Visual spatial cognition will be organized primarily according to the following schemes: bottom-up/top-down processing, dorsal/ventral stream processing, and egocentric/allocentric frames of reference.

Keywords:

• Vision
• Dementia
• Neuropsychology
• Visuospatial
• Parkinson disease
• Alzheimer disease
• Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration
• Progressive Supranuclear Palsy
• Dementia with Lewy bodies

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by 2008-A-020-FEL from the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation. I thank Bruce L. Miller and Joel H. Kramer for their helpful comments on this manuscript.