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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

Examining the Characteristics of Episodic Memory using Event-related Potentials in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease
Published on: August 30, 2011
False recognition of pictures versus words in Alzheimer's disease: the distinctiveness heuristic
Andrew E Budson1, Joanne Sitarski, Kirk R Daffner
1Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. abudson@partners.org
Abstract:
False recognition of semantic associates can be reduced when older adults also study pictures representing each associate. D. L. Schacter, L. Israel, and C. Racine (1999) attributed this reduction to the operation of a distinctiveness heuristic: a response mode in which participants demand access to detailed recollections to support a positive recognition decision. The authors examined patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and older adults with this paradigm. Half of the participants studied pictures and auditory words; the other half studied visual and auditory words. Older adults who studied pictures were able to reduce their false alarms compared with those who studied words only. AD patients who studied pictures were unable to reduce their false alarms compared with those who studied words only and, in fact, exhibited trends toward greater false recognition. Implications for understanding semantic memory in AD patients are discussed.
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