ScholarOne - Music modulates attentional biases and attention to
discriminating facial features in Alzheimers disease.
Abstract
Reduced attention on a facial region with discriminating features
(RwDF), as displayed by some older adults with/without dementia, is
associated with impaired social interaction and depression. Musical
interventions are commonly used in dementia-care to facilitate social
interaction and reduce depression. While the stimuli that individuals
dwell on (attentional bias (AB)) and RwDF dwell-time can change after
music exposure/interventions, research exploring music’s effect on
older-adults’ AB and RwDF dwell-time is lacking. Participants in the
current study completed online self-report mood measures, a cognitive
status interview, and AB measurements via home-based webcam eye-tracking
in silence and then with background music. For each trial, participants
fixated on a cross, naturally viewed pairs of facial images conveying
sad, angry, happy, and neutral emotions, and then fixated on a dot. We
compared the proportion of dwell-time on emotional faces, and the
top-half RwDF (containing the eyes) versus the bottom-half RwDF
(containing the mouth) (important in angry and happy face recognition,
respectively) of these images. Results showed that cognitively impaired
and cognitively healthy participants dwelled more on sad faces, less on
angry faces, but differed in their dwell-time on happy faces during the
background music condition compared to the silence condition. Our data
suggests that AB change could be associated with rumination level and
silent-condition AB direction for sad and angry faces, respectively.
Group top-half and bottom-half RwDF dwell-times were generally modulated
in opposing directions. Future larger studies are warranted to replicate
our findings and to examine their effects on social interactions,
rumination levels, and mood.