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Decisions at your fingertips: Characterizing object-oriented decision making with hand movements in older adults

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Valerie Sainterant¹ (), Chloe Davis², Chris Martin^1,2; ¹Program in Neuroscience, Florida State University, ²Department of Psychology, Florida State University

As life expectancy increases, age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are becoming more prevalent. This progressive brain disorder develops decades before behavioral or clinical symptoms appear, making early diagnosis and treatment challenging. Effective, theoretically informed cognitive screening should be guided by our understanding of AD neuropathology, with emphasis on the cortical regions first affected by the accumulation of tauopathy. According to Braak staging, AD pathology begins in the transentorhinal cortex of the medial temporal lobe, which includes perirhinal cortex (PRC), an area critically involved in object processing. Evidence from multiple methodologies links the integrity of PRC representations to performance on object-based categorization, recognition memory, and perceptual decisions. This is particularly true of experiments that involve discrimination among objects with a high degree of overlapping features. Building on this, this study investigates whether kinematic data, recorded as swipe trajectories on a tablet, can reveal the integrity of PRC-based object representations in older adults. To this end, older adults, ranging from cognitively healthy to mild cognitively impaired, will complete tasks involving object categorization, perceptual matching, and recognition memory. Swipe trajectories will be recorded as dependent measures to capture subtle differences in finger movements that may reflect underlying cognitive processes, beyond what reaction time and accuracy alone can reveal. We will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how individual differences in swipe trajectories relate to object representations in PRC. This work will test influential theories of object representation in a manner that has potential clinical relevance for AD screening and staging.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making