Abstract: Orientation is a fundamental cognitive faculty, allowing the behaving self to link his/her current state to their internal representations of the external world. Once exclusively linked to knowledge of the current place and present time, in recent years, the concept of orientation has evolved to include processing of social, temporal, and abstract relations. Concordantly with the growing focus on orientation, spatial disorientation has been increasingly recognized as a hallmark symptom of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In the presentation I will first elaborate on the cognitive construct of Orientation and its ecological validity. I will supply evidence for its central role in AD already in the very early stages and its potential use in functional understanding of several manifestations of the disease as well as in practical clinical approach.

Webex Link: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin-en/j.php?MTID=ma4019d11685f88ad20d418f8d43ed2a2