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Auditory sensory memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease: an event-related potential study
E Pekkonen1, V Jousmäki, M Könönen
1Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Kuopio, Finland.
Abstract:
Auditory event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded from 10 healthy older subjects and 9 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate whether auditory sensory memory is impaired in AD. Standard (85%) and deviant (15%) tones were presented in random order with interstimulus intervals (ISI) of 1 s or 3 s in separate blocks. Deviant tones elicited a specific ERP component called mismatch negativity (MMN) which reflects automatic stimulus change detection and thus presumably, the neural basis of sensory memory in audition. The MMN amplitude decreased as a function of the ISI more in the AD group than in the control group. This suggests that the memory trace decays faster in the AD patients than in age-matched healthy controls.