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Updated: Jul 21, 2026

Examining the Characteristics of Episodic Memory using Event-related Potentials in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease
Published on: August 30, 2011
Event-related brain potential evidence of spared knowledge in Alzheimer's disease
J M Ford1, N Askari, D H Mathalon
1Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine and Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System, California 94305-5550, USA.
Abstract:
The authors recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to picture primes and word targets (picture-name verification task) in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in elderly and young participants. N400 was more negative to words that did not match pictures than to words that did match pictures in all groups: In the young, this effect was significant at all scalp sites; in the elderly, it was only at central-parietal sites; and in AD patients, it was limited to right central-parietal sites. Among AD patients pretested with a confrontation-naming task to identify pictures they could not name, neither the N400 priming effect nor its scalp distribution was affected by ability to name pictures correctly. This ERP evidence of spared knowledge of these items was complemented by 80% performance accuracy. Thus, although the name of an item may be inaccessible in confrontation naming, N400 shows that knowledge is intact enough to prime cortical responses.
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