Impaired Affordance Perception as the Basis of Tool Use Deficiency in Alzheimer’s Disease

The present study investigated whether defective affordance perception capacity underpins tool use deficits in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). An affordance, a concept James Gibson introduced, scales environmental objects to an animal’s action capabilities, thus offering opportunities for action. Each man-made artifact carries both a primary affordance (its designed function) and secondary affordances. In Experiment 1, participants identified secondary affordances of objects as a measure of their ability to identify alternative uses of familiar tools. A single response Go/No-Go task was administered to 4 groups: AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and elderly controls (EC). Groups were matched for age and years of education. The AD group performed poorest, followed by MCI, and PD and EC. EC and PD groups’ results failed to reach statistical significance, and the AD group performed at chance. In Experiment 2, participants judged the physical properties of the same objects used in Experiment 1. Even AD patients performed reliably, ruling out a visual processing deficit as the basis for their poor performance in Experiment 1. Results suggest that degraded affordance detection capacity can differentiate AD from normal aging and other neurodegenerative disorders and could be an affordable marker for AD, even in the early stages of AD.