Visual clutter 'harms Alzheimer's patients'

A new report has highlighted the impact of 'visual clutter' on people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

According to researchers working at the University of Toronto and the Georgia Institute of Technology, the results of their study has shown that an individual's inability to recognise once-familiar faces and objects could well have as much to do with difficulty perceiving their distinct features as it does with the capacity to recall from memory.

Research published in the October issue of Hippocampus suggested that memory impairments for people diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer's could in part be due to problems with determining the differences between similar objects.

"Not only does memory seem to be very closely linked to perception, but it's also likely that one affects the other," said Morgan Barense of the University of Toronto's Department of Psychology.

Earlier this week, Washington State University researchers revealed a study showing a new drug treatment for Alzheimer's disease has been found to repair connections between cells in the brain.

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