Evaluation of touch perception abilities in typical and atypical ageing.
Ageing is one of the most challenging issues that contemporary society is facing. In pace with the increasing global rate of life expectancies, there is a proportional spread of dementia cases, known to be a major cause of dependency and disability among older adults. Sensory impairments in ageing are considered a potential precursor of decline in several higher-level cognitive functions. In this context, sensory modalities such as audition and vision have been widely investigated; however, little is known about age-related alteration in tactile perception and its potential effect on cognitive abilities.
The proposed project will systematically investigate the progression of tactile function in healthy ageing and in pathological populations (i.e., Alzheimer’s disease, AD), with the ultimate aim of providing behavioural markers that can serve as early indicators of dementia.
To accomplish this, a set of behavioural tasks that have been successfully adopted in previous work with healthy adults (i.e., go/no-go detection task, mislocalization task, inbetween task), and neuroimaging recording (i.e., functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, fNIRS) will be used to assess different levels of tactile representations and their neural bases in both healthy and pathological ageing conditions.
This investigation will provide important insights into how tactile abilities change in older age and the clinical domain. It will help to develop a new battery of somatosensory assessment tests and diagnostic criteria to detect dementia, promoting early diagnosis and thus improving the efficacy of therapeutic interventions and the general well-being of older adults.