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Updated: Aug 21, 2026

Examining the Characteristics of Episodic Memory using Event-related Potentials in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease
Published on: August 30, 2011
Loss of distinctive features and a broader pattern of priming in Alzheimer's disease
Lina Alathari1, Catherine Trinh Ngo, Stephen Dopkins
1Psychology Department, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA.
Abstract:
The results of 2 experiments support the contention that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show a relative loss of the semantic features that distinguish concepts from one another and that the representations of pairs of concepts consequently share a larger proportion of their associated features in AD than in normal aging. In Experiment 1, AD patients listed fewer features for a set of concepts than did healthy older adults and were more deficient at listing features if the features were distinctive to particular concepts than if they were shared by multiple concepts. In Experiment 2, AD patients showed online priming at levels of relatedness at which healthy older adults did not.
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