The Ability to Use Contextual Information in Object and Scene Recognition in Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background: The ability to understand and make use of object-scene relationships are critical for object and scene recognition. Objective: The current study assessed whether patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), possibly in the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease, exhibited impairment in processing contextual information in scene and object recognition. Methods: In Experiment 1, subjects viewed images of foreground objects in either semantic consistent or inconsistent scenes under no time pressure, and they verbally reported the names of foreground objects and backgrounds. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, except that subjects were required to name scene first. Experiment 3 examined object and scene recognition accuracy baselines, recognition difficulty, familiarity with objects/scenes, and object-scene consistency judgements. Results: There were contextual consistency effects on scene recognition for MCI and healthy subjects, regardless of response sequence. Scenes were recognized more accurately under the consistent condition than the inconsistent condition. Additionally, MCI patients were more susceptible to incongruent contextual information, possibly due to inhibitory deficits or over-dependence on semantic knowledge. However, no significant differences between MCI and healthy subjects were observed in consistency judgement, recognition accuracy, recognition difficulty and familiarity rating, suggesting no significant impairment in object and scene knowledge among MCI subjects. Conclusions: The study indicates that MCI patients retain relatively intact contextual processing ability but may exhibit inhibitory deficits or over-reliance on semantic knowledge.