How Pattern Information Analyses of Semantic Brain Activity Elicited in Language Comprehension Could Contribute to the Early Identification of Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with a loss of semantic knowledge reflecting brain pathophysiology that begins years before dementia. Identifying early signs of pathophysiology induced dysfunction in the neural systems that access and process words' meaning could therefore help forecast dementia. This article reviews pioneering studies demonstrating that abnormal functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) response patterns elicited in semantic tasks reflect both AD-pathophysiology and the hereditary risk of AD, and also can help forecast cognitive decline. However, to bring current semantic task-based fMRI research up to date with new AD research guidelines the relationship with different types of AD-pathophysiology needs to be more thoroughly examined. We shall argue that new analytic techniques and experimental paradigms will be critical for this. Previous work has relied on specialized tests of specific components of semantic knowledge/processing (e.g. famous name recognition) to reveal coarse AD-related changes in activation across broad brain regions. Recent computational advances now enable more detailed tests of the semantic information that is represented within brain regions during more natural language comprehension. These new methods stand to more directly index how pathophysiology alters neural information processing, whilst using language comprehension as the basis for a more comprehensive examination of semantic brain function. We here connect the semantic pattern information analysis literature up with AD research to raise awareness to potential cross-disciplinary research opportunities.