Self- and Other-Evaluation in Alzheimer's Disease

Impaired awareness of ability is common in dementia and has important clinical implications. Evidence from different clinical groups has shown that awareness can vary according to whether evaluation refers to self or other performance.

The present study aimed to investigate awareness for self- and other-performance in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, exploring if results vary according to cognitive domain of the tasks. It was hypothesized that, particularly for memory tasks, AD patients would be inaccurate in relation to self-but not other-performance.

Twenty-two mild to moderate AD patients and twenty-two healthy older adults participated. Two tasks, with reaction time and working memory tasks, were carried out, and each had a success and a failure condition. Participants were asked to estimate their own performance, as well as the performance of another person they observed. Awareness of performance was measured comparing participant estimations of performance with actual performance.

For both the reaction time and working memory tasks, results indicate that participants from both groups overestimated the performance in the failure condition and underestimated the performance in the success condition. They tended to overestimate more the performance of the other person compared to themselves. Additionally, for the working memory task, AD patients tended to overestimate more performances compared to controls.

Findings suggest that the AD and control groups present the same pattern, with attribution of better performance to another person. For the AD group, the pattern of response was different for memory tasks, which may suggest domain-specific limited awareness.