Attentional deficits in Alzheimer's: investigating the role of acetylcholine with computational modelling

Attention is a very important cognitive process that is employed for many actions in our everydaylife (e.g. watching television, reading a paper, washing our face, eatingand so on). It is therefore essential to investigate further the underlying mechanisms inneuro-degenerativeconditions, like Alzheimer?s disease, in which ourattentional abilities are reduced(Festa, Heindel, & Ott, 2010; Foster, Behrmann, & Stuss, 1999; Hao et al., 2005; Porter, Tales, et al., 2010; Redel et al., 2012; A. Tales et al., 2002a; Vallejo et al., 2016).Alzheimer?s disease is a condition that can take severalyears if not decades from the time it starts to the time the full symptoms are shown (Tijms & Visser, 2018).In those years of disease progression,there are a number of pathological processes that are taking place, however one of the starting point of the pathologyis believed to be the aggregation of ?amyloids into plaques(Gordon et al., 2018; Tijms & Visser, 2018). Irrespective ofthe amount of research that has taken place,manyquestionsremain on how the disease unfolds and how to identify individual?s position in the disease?s trajectory(Gordon et al., 2018; Ryman et al., 2014).