An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes severe impairments in cognitive function but there is evidence that aspects of esthetic perception are somewhat spared, at least in early stages of the disease. People with early Alzheimer’s-related dementia have been found to show similar degrees of stability over ti...

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Main Authors:	Graham, Daniel J., Stockinger, Simone, Leder, Helmut
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Frontiers Media S.A. 2013
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3590566/

id	pubmed-3590566
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-35905662013-03-07 An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia Graham, Daniel J. Stockinger, Simone Leder, Helmut Psychology Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes severe impairments in cognitive function but there is evidence that aspects of esthetic perception are somewhat spared, at least in early stages of the disease. People with early Alzheimer’s-related dementia have been found to show similar degrees of stability over time in esthetic judgment of paintings compared to controls, despite poor explicit memory for the images. Here we expand on this line of inquiry to investigate the types of perceptual judgments involved, and to test whether people in later stages of the disease also show evidence of preserved esthetic judgment. Our results confirm that, compared to healthy controls, there is similar esthetic stability in early stage AD in the absence of explicit memory, and we report here that people with later stages of the disease also show similar stability compared to controls. However, while we find that stability for portrait paintings, landscape paintings, and landscape photographs is not different compared to control group performance, stability for face photographs – which were matched for identity with the portrait paintings – was significantly impaired in the AD group. We suggest that partially spared face-processing systems interfere with esthetic processing of natural faces in ways that are not found for artistic images and landscape photographs. Thus, our work provides a novel form of evidence regarding face-processing in healthy and diseased aging. Our work also gives insights into general theories of esthetics, since people with AD are not encumbered by many of the semantic and emotional factors that otherwise color esthetic judgment. We conclude that, for people with AD, basic esthetic judgment of artistic images represents an “island of stability” in a condition that in most other respects causes profound cognitive disruption. As such, esthetic response could be a promising route to future therapies. Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-03-07 /pmc/articles/PMC3590566/ /pubmed/23471005 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00107 Text en Copyright © 2013 Graham, Stockinger and Leder. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Graham, Daniel J. Stockinger, Simone Leder, Helmut
spellingShingle	Graham, Daniel J. Stockinger, Simone Leder, Helmut An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia
author_facet	Graham, Daniel J. Stockinger, Simone Leder, Helmut
author_sort	Graham, Daniel J.
title	An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia
title_short	An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia
title_full	An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia
title_fullStr	An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia
title_full_unstemmed	An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia
title_sort	island of stability: art images and natural scenes – but not natural faces – show consistent esthetic response in alzheimer’s-related dementia
description	Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes severe impairments in cognitive function but there is evidence that aspects of esthetic perception are somewhat spared, at least in early stages of the disease. People with early Alzheimer’s-related dementia have been found to show similar degrees of stability over time in esthetic judgment of paintings compared to controls, despite poor explicit memory for the images. Here we expand on this line of inquiry to investigate the types of perceptual judgments involved, and to test whether people in later stages of the disease also show evidence of preserved esthetic judgment. Our results confirm that, compared to healthy controls, there is similar esthetic stability in early stage AD in the absence of explicit memory, and we report here that people with later stages of the disease also show similar stability compared to controls. However, while we find that stability for portrait paintings, landscape paintings, and landscape photographs is not different compared to control group performance, stability for face photographs – which were matched for identity with the portrait paintings – was significantly impaired in the AD group. We suggest that partially spared face-processing systems interfere with esthetic processing of natural faces in ways that are not found for artistic images and landscape photographs. Thus, our work provides a novel form of evidence regarding face-processing in healthy and diseased aging. Our work also gives insights into general theories of esthetics, since people with AD are not encumbered by many of the semantic and emotional factors that otherwise color esthetic judgment. We conclude that, for people with AD, basic esthetic judgment of artistic images represents an “island of stability” in a condition that in most other respects causes profound cognitive disruption. As such, esthetic response could be a promising route to future therapies.
publisher	Frontiers Media S.A.
publishDate	2013
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3590566/
_version_	1611960295985512448

An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes – but Not Natural Faces – Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia

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