Reducing visual clutter may help Alzheimer’s patients

It’s a finding that could help Alzheimer’s patients better cope with their condition.

Psychologists at the University of Toronto and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have shown that the inability to recognize once-familiar faces and objects may have as much to do with difficulty perceiving their distinct features as it does with the capacity to recall from memory.

A study published in the October issue of Hippocampus suggests that memory impairments for people diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease may in part be due to problems with determining the differences between similar objects.

The research contributes to growing evidence that a part of the brain once believed to support memory exclusively – the medial temporal lobe – also plays a role in object perception.