# AUTOMATIC AND ATTENTIONAL MECHANISMS AND SDAT

> **NIH NIH R01** · WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY · 1992 · $100,188

## Abstract

As the elderly population increases, senile dementia of the Alzheimer
type (SDAT) is becoming one of the most devastating health problems
facing society. Early in SDAT, individuals primarily produce memory
deficits, however, these deficits are typically followed by widespread
breakdowns in cognitive performance. The widespread involvement of
cognitive processes in Alzheimer's disease suggests that there may be
fundamental cognitive mechanisms involved in the progression of the
disease. The goal of the present proposal is to continue our pursuit for
such a fundamental mechanism. Specifically, the proposed studies all
address the notion that SDAT individuals have difficulty inhibiting
irrelevant information at different stages within the information
processing system. Such a failure to inhibit the processing the
irrelevant information has recently gained considerable attention in
research addressing infants, children, and young and older adults.
Recent evidence indicates that a breakdown in one's ability to inhibit
irrelevant information can influence processes involved in perception,
memory, comprehension, and even syntactic parsing. Furthermore, recent
work completed in our lab (supported by Grant R01 AG03991) indicates
that SDAT individuals fail to inhibit unbiased meanings of ambiguous
words, and also fail to inhibit noncued locations in visual attentional
tasks. In addition to providing information regarding failure to inhibit
irrelevant information in SDAT individuals, the present work will also
provide further information regarding the notion that healthy aged
individuals produce some breakdown in their ability to inhibit
irrelevant information. Each experiment will involve four groups of
subjects (healthy young adults, healthy older adults, questionably
demented individuals, and mildly demented individuals). The first
experiments will address the phenomenon referred to as inhibition of
return in a visual spatial processing task. The second experiment will
address the negative impact of earlier   ignored irrelevant information
when it   subsequently becomes relevant. Experiments 3 to 7 address
processes involved in selecting meaning for ambiguous words in simple
naming, word association, and in a relatedness judgement task. Each
experiment will also include manipulations of stimulus onset asynchrony
to track the time-course of inhibitory  operations across the four
groups of subjects. All experiments involve either simple key presses or
vocal responses, and the resulting response latencies and error rates
will be used to index underlying cognitive operations.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 3122149
- **Project number:** 1R01AG010193-01
- **Recipient organization:** WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
- **SAM.gov UEI:** L6NFUM28LQM5
- **Principal Investigator:** David A Balota
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1992
- **Award amount:** $100,188
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 1992-06-01 → 1994-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/3122149

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 3122149, AUTOMATIC AND ATTENTIONAL MECHANISMS AND SDAT (1R01AG010193-01). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/3122149. Licensed CC0.

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