Dissociation between two forms of conceptual priming in Alzheimer's disease

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy control participants performed 2 conceptual repetition priming tasks, word-associate production and category-exemplar production. Both tasks had identical study-phases of reading target words aloud, had the most common responses as target items, and required production of a single response. Patients with AD showed normal priming on word-associate production but impaired priming on category-exemplar production. This dissociation in AD suggests that conceptual priming is not a unitary form of memory but rather is mediated by separable memory systems.