Discrimination and reliance on conceptual fluency cues are inversely related in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

卷:47

Article

Wolk, David A.^1,2  Gold, Carl A.^3,4,5  Signoff, Eric D.⁶  Budson, Andrew E.^3,4 

[1] Univ Penn, Dept Neurol, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA

[2] Univ Pittsburgh, Dept Neurol, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA

[3] Edith Nourse Rogers Mem Vet Adm Hosp, Geriatr Res Educ Clin Ctr, Ctr Translat Cognit Neurosci, Bedford, MA 01730 USA

[4] Boston Univ, Sch Med, Dept Neurol, Alzheimers Dis Ctr, Boston, MA 02118 USA

[5] Univ Med & Dent New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Med Sch, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA

[6] Univ Pittsburgh, Alzheimers Dis Res Ctr, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA

关键词: Recognition memory;    Alzheimer's disease;    Fluency;    Recollection;    Familiarity;    Dual process;    False memory;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.02.029

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Prior work suggests that patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) often base their recognition memory decisions on familiarity. It has been argued that conceptual fluency may play an important role in the feeling of familiarity. In the present study we measured the effect of conceptual fluency manipulations on recognition judgments of patients with mild AD and older adult controls. Easy and hard test conditions were created by manipulating encoding depth and list length to yield high and low discrimination, respectively. When the two participant groups performed identical procedures, AD patients displayed lower discrimination and greater reliance on fluency cues than controls. However, when the discrimination of older adult controls was decreased to the level of AD patients by use of a shallow encoding task, we found that controls reliance on fluency did not statistically differ from AD patients. Furthermore, we found that increasing discrimination using shorter study lists resulted in AD patients decreasing their reliance on fluency cues to a similar extent as controls. These findings support the notion that patients with AD are able to attribute conceptual fluency to prior experience. In addition, these findings suggest that discrimination and reliance on fluency cues may be inversely related in both AD patients and older adult controls. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

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