Understanding Social Communication Abilities in Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease

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Project summary Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and their caregivers experience significant challenges in daily conversations and social communication. Yet, it is less understood how these challenges can be effectively managed and what recommendations can be made with respect to the strategies for both individuals with ADRD and caregivers to optimize their optimal communication. The long-term objectives of the proposed study are to develop efficient management strategies and to hone caregiver training and education strategies for individuals with ADRD. Our proposed study will lay foundation to achieve these goals through an improved understanding of the characteristics and underpinning mechanisms of social communication deficits, namely audience design impairments in individuals with amnestic Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Audience design is a key to successful social communication and involves speaker modulation of their utterances depending on the partner’s knowledge. The specific aims of the proposed research are: (1) to understand verbal and non- verbal audience design impairments in individuals with AD and healthy older adults, and (2) elucidate cognitive and linguistic substrates underlying the audience design skills in these populations. We will deploy an experimental paradigm using referential communication tasks to study communication in the lab with a high ecological validity that simulates aspects of natural communication in everyday life. During the task, a participant and an experimenter will solve a task that is highly dependent on interactive and dynamic communication. The participant will repeatedly describe a set of abstract images to the experimenter; the changing properties of the spoken and non-verbal communication over time can be used as a measure of the extent to which partners develop shared knowledge. The participant will also describe abstract images to different partners with different shared knowledge in multiparty conversational setting. Performance data obtained during the communication task will be analyzed to delineate how participants with AD tailor their language based on their partner’s perspectives. Following the referential communication task, a standardized language and cognitive test battery will be given to measure attention, memory, executive function, and language. The data set will be analyzed to determine what cognitive and/or linguistic factors significantly contribute to or associated with the observed audience design deficits. The multi-PI approach is designed to take advantage of complementary expertise in the techniques and theories of Cognitive Science and Speech- Language Pathology, and the resources unique to both Iowa and Tennessee.