Visual imagery deficits in posterior cortical atrophy

ABSTRACT

Visual imagery has a close overlapping relationship with visual perception. Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome marked by early impairments in visuospatial processing and visual object recognition. We asked whether PCA would therefore also be marked by deficits in visual imagery, tested using objective forced-choice questionnaires, and whether imagery deficits would be selective for certain properties. We recruited four patients with PCA and a patient with integrative visual agnosia due to bilateral occipitotemporal strokes for comparison. We administered a test battery probing imagery for object shape, size, colour lightness, hue, upper-case letters, lower-case letters, word shape, letter construction, and faces. All subjects showed significant impairments in visual imagery, with imagery for lower-case letters most likely to be spared. We conclude that PCA subjects can show severe deficits in visual imagery. Further work is needed to establish how frequently this occurs and how early it can be found.

KEYWORDS:

• Posterior cortical atrophy
• Alzheimer’s disease
• visual imagery
• visuospatial
• visuoperceptual

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the patients and families for their generous participation in our research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

1 Videos of BH’s performance can be found at: https://www.neuroophthalmology.ca/case-of-the-month/vision/some-assembly-required.

2 Please note that the adjusted degrees of freedom (Greenhouse-Geisser correction) are reported for this ANOVA since Mauchly’s test of sphericity revealed a significant violation of such assumption (χ² = 218.9, df = 35, p < .001).

Additional information

Funding

JB was supported by the Canada Research Chairs [grant number 950–228984] and the Marianne Koerner Chair in Brain Diseases.