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Examining the Characteristics of Episodic Memory using Event-related Potentials in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease
Published on: August 30, 2011
Implicit/explicit memory dissociation in Alzheimer's disease: the consequence of inappropriate processing?
Sylvie Willems1, Eric Salmon, Martial Van der Linden
1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of Liège. sylvie.willems@ulg.ac.be
Neuropsychology
|November 13, 2008
Summary
Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients show intact perceptual priming but impaired recognition. This study found that encouraging holistic processing during recognition tasks significantly improved AD patients' performance, suggesting strategy influences fluency use.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Neurology
Background:
- Dual-process theories suggest perceptual fluency underlies recognition and priming.
- The priming-without-recognition dissociation in Alzheimer's disease (AD) challenges this, showing intact priming with impaired recognition.
- This dissociation implies familiarity and perceptual priming may be distinct processes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if processing strategies explain the priming-without-recognition dissociation in AD patients.
- To determine if AD patients' use of perceptual fluency is strategy-dependent.
Main Methods:
- Replicated the priming-without-recognition effect in 16 AD patients with intact exposure effects but null recognition.
- Manipulated processing strategies (holistic vs. analytic) during recognition and priming tasks.
- Compared performance of AD patients and healthy controls under different processing conditions.
Main Results:
- Confirmed the priming-without-recognition effect in the studied AD cohort.
- Inducing a holistic processing strategy during recognition testing significantly improved AD patients' recognition performance.
- Analytic processing decreased performance in both priming and recognition tasks for AD patients.
Conclusions:
- The use of perceptual fluency in priming and recognition by AD patients is contingent on their processing approach.
- Processing strategy choice may be influenced by the perceived task difficulty in AD.
- Findings suggest cognitive strategies can modulate memory performance in Alzheimer's disease.
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