The relationship between cognitive status and visual information processing.

The present investigation involved an examination of susceptibility to visual masking of older adults displaying evidence of Alzheimer's disease and healthy, cognitively intact older adults. Results indicated that the cognitively impaired group was more susceptible to the perceptual interference of a visual mask than was the cognitively intact group. In addition, the impaired group was found to be particularly susceptible to masking by a visual pattern (which had similar figural characteristics to target stimuli) as compared to masking by random noise (which had figural characteristics unrelated to the target). Finally, susceptibility to masking was found to be negatively correlated with performance on the Information subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised and with rated level of cognitive functioning. It was concluded that this pattern of results represents an acceleration of changes in perceptual processing typically associated with normal human aging.