Attentional capture by incongruent object/background scenes in patients with Alzheimer disease

In contrast to healthy controls patients with AD exhibited a strong, significant, bias towards incongruent object/background scenes, even in the free viewing task, suggesting that unfamiliar or deviant stimuli attract their attention spontaneously. This result is in line with studies showing impairments in filtering out irrelevant distractors in visual search tasks and with studies suggesting inefficient top-down control to select relevant information at early stage of the disease.