Do Alzheimer's Disease Patients Benefit From Prior-Knowledge in Associative Recognition Memory?
J Int Neuropsychol Soc 2019;
25:443-452. [PMID:
30696494 DOI:
10.1017/s1355617718001212]
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Abstract
OBJECTIVES
Although the influence of prior knowledge on associative memory in healthy aging has received great attention, it has never been studied in Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study aimed at assessing whether AD patients could benefit from prior knowledge in associative memory and whether such benefit would be related to the integrity of their semantic memory.
METHODS
Twenty-one AD patients and 21 healthy older adults took part in an associative memory task using semantically related and unrelated word pairs and were also submitted to an evaluation of their semantic memory.
RESULTS
While participants of both groups benefited from semantic relatedness in associative discrimination, related pairs recognition was significantly predicted by semantic memory integrity in healthy older adults only.
CONCLUSIONS
We suggest that patients benefitted from semantic knowledge to improve their performance in the associative memory task, but that such performance is not related to semantic knowledge integrity evaluation measures because the two tasks differ in the way semantic information is accessed: in an automatic manner for the associative memory task, with automatic processes thought to be relatively preserved in AD, and in a controlled manner for the semantic knowledge evaluation, with controlled processes thought to be impaired in AD. (JINS, 2019, 25, 443-452).
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