Rehabilitation of Facial Emotion Recognition in Alzheimer's Disease

It is commonly admitted that social cognition impairment, like deficit in facial emotion recognition or misinterpretation of others' intentions (Theory of Mind), are associated with social behavior disorders. This kind of disorders are observed in Fronto-Temporal Dementia, Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) and Parkinson's Disease, with severe deficits in FTD and lighter deficits in AD and PD. One explanation is that patients apply inappropriate visual exploration strategies to decode emotions and intentions of others. Our study aims to evaluate impacts of an emotion recognition rehabilitation program, named Training of Affect Recognition, on social cognition abilities (facial emotion recognition (FER) and theory of mind (ToM)) in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In addition, we hypothesis that the effect of this rehabilitation will also evolve gaze strategies, behavioral disorders, and the caregiver's burden.