Focused and divided attention in Alzheimer's disease.

Visual search tasks were used to examine two aspects of selective attention (focused and divided attention) in normal young and older persons and in Alzheimer patients. Normal and demented subjects were equally efficient in using a color cue to selectively search only the relevant items in an array. Thus, focused attention abilities appear to be relatively unimpaired by Alzheimer's disease. By contrast, in comparison to normals, the search time of demented patients rose disproportionately as the number of items over which they had to distribute their attention was increased. This suggests that Alzheimer patients are less efficient than normals in dividing their attention.