The neuropsychological studies of dementias in Taiwan: Focus on way-finding problems in Alzheimer's patients

Human urban navigation depends on environmental cognition and the decision making to choose route. Impairment of these two components may result in way-finding problems, one of the most frequent symptoms in patients with AD. Chiu and her colleagues had studies getting lost behavior in AD patients and concluded that the getting lost behavior in such patients is in part accounted by their executive dysfunction. Pai and his colleagues, on the other hand, used experimentally designed tasks to test AD patients what they have called "the retrogenetic hypothesis of navigational ability". They have been focused on environmental cognition. Recently, they have begun to explore this issue by using electrophysiological tools and yielded some results.