Negative Prospective Memory in Alzheimer's Disease: "Do Not Perform That Action"

"Do not take that medication": negative prospective memory in Korsakoff's syndrome

BACKGROUND

While prospective memory (i.e., the ability to execute a future plan) has been extensively researched, little is known about negative prospective memory (i.e., the ability to remember not to execute a future plan) in Korsakoff's syndrome (KS). We thus evaluated both prospective memory and negative prospective memory in KS, as well as the relationship between both types of prospective memory and inhibition.

METHODS

Patients with KS and control participants were invited to press a button on the keyboard (i.e., prospective memory) or not to press a button when a cue word (e.g., negative prospective memory) was encountered.

RESULTS

The analysis demonstrated that patients with KS had more prospective memory errors (i.e., forgetting to click the keyboard when the instruction was to do so) than control participants. The analysis also demonstrated that patients with KS had more negative prospective memory errors (i.e., clicking the keyboard when the instruction was not to do so) than control participants. Similar levels of commissions and omissions were observed in patients with KS than in control participants. Interestingly, prospective and negative prospective performances were significantly correlated with performance on an inhibition assessment task.

DISCUSSION

Our study demonstrates that KS is characterized by not only difficulty in remembering to execute a future intention but also by difficulty in remembering not to execute a future intention. A decline in negative prospective memory in KS can be associated with difficulty in inhibiting no longer appropriate previously learned intentions.

Relationship Between Future Thinking and Prospective Memory in Alzheimer's Disease

Background

Future thinking and prospective memory are two cognitive processes oriented toward the future and reliant on the ability to envision oneself in future scenarios.

Objective

We explored the connection between future thinking and prospective memory in individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods

We invited both AD participants and control participants to engage in event-based prospective memory tasks (e.g., "please hand me this stopwatch when I inform you there are 10 minutes remaining") and time-based prospective memory tasks (e.g., "close the book you are working on in five minutes"). Additionally, we asked participants to engage in a future thinking task where they imagined upcoming events.

Results

Analysis revealed that AD participants exhibited lower performance in both prospective memory tasks and future thinking compared to the control group. Importantly, we identified significant positive correlations between the performance on event- and time-based prospective memory tasks and future thinking abilities among AD participants.

Conclusions

These findings underscore the connection between the decline in both prospective memory domains and the ability to envision future events in individuals with AD. Our results also shed light on the challenges AD individuals face when trying to project themselves into the future to mentally pre-experience upcoming events.

Time-Based and Event-Based Prospective Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform planned actions in a future moment and it is of fundamental importance for an independent and autonomous lifestyle from development to late adulthood. Deficits in episodic memory and executive functions, which are involved in PM are characteristic features of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Considering that the number of older adults is drastically increasing over the next decades, it is of great interest to understand how PM decline in healthy older adults and patients with different degree of cognitive decline. The present meta-analysis included 46 studies investigating PM performance in AD patients (17 studies) and people with MCI (24 studies); 5 studies included both clinical conditions in the same article. The 46 studies contributed a total of 63 independent samples and 129 effect sizes from 4668 participants (2115 patients and 2553 controls). Unlike previous reviews of the literature, our results with a larger and updated sample of studies confirmed lower PM abilities in AD compared to MCI and controls, although we did not observe conclusive differences between event-based and time-based PM in patients. Surprisingly, PM deficits shown by MCI and AD patients have decreased across years, in parallel to a reduction of the evidence of publication bias and an increase in the number of observations per task. We propose the use of more reliable research designs as one plausible explanation for the reduction of PM impairments.

Cuing Prospective Memory With Smartphone-Based Calendars in Alzheimer's Disease

OBJECTIVES

We investigated the effect of using smartphone-based calendars (Google and Outlook Calendar) on prospective memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD).

METHODS

we recruited two groups of participants with mild AD. In one group, prospective memory was cued by a paper-and-pencil calendar, whereas in the second group prospective memory was cued by a smartphone calendar application. After 2 weeks of training to familiarize the participants with calendar use, we invited participants to perform three prospective events per week (e.g., remembering to go to the grocery store) during a 3-week period. Events were cued either by the paper- or smartphone-based calendar.

RESULTS

we observed fewer omissions of prospective events in the smartphone-based calendar group than in the paper-based calendar group.

CONCLUSIONS

our study suggests positive effects of smartphone calendar applications on prospective memory in AD.

From retrospective to prospective memory research: a framework for investigating the deactivation of intentions

The definition of episodic memory has evolved into a multifaceted concept that gathered great attention in several research areas in psychology and neuroscience. Prospective memory (PM), or the ability to remember to perform delayed intentions at a later moment in the future, represents one side of this capacity for which that has been a growing interest. In this review, we examined a counterintuitive finding: PM intentions may persist and affect our behaviour despite successful goal attainment and task completion, which in daily life may be as serious as taking medication twice. This review aims to elucidate the existing knowledge and identify some unresolved questions concerning this specific memory failure. Therefore, this review provides an overview of the uprising research dedicated to both PM omission and commission errors, including an analysis of its definitions, of the current theoretical approaches of PM retrieval, and the main procedures used in this field to offer an integrative perspective on this topic. Finally, the last section is devoted to discussing future directions to test the predictions of our suggested theoretical explanations for PM deactivation. This might be an avenue for research that is likely to extend our understanding of episodic memory's usefulness in everyday life.

Identification of the Oculo-Motor System in the Form Volterra Model Based on Eye-Tracking Data

Instrumental computing and software tools have been developed for constructing a nonlinear dynamic model of the human oculo-motor system (OMS) based on the data of input-output experiments using test visual stimulus and innovative technology. Volterra model in the form of multidimensional transition functions of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd orders, taking into account the inertial and nonlinear properties of the OMS was used as the identification tool. Eye-tracking data developed in the Matlab environment are tested on real datasets from an experimental study of OMS.

Social commitment toward prospective memory tasks in cognitively impaired non-demented individuals

Prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future, has been found to be diminished in cognitively impaired non-demented individuals (CIND). This study investigated whether providing CIND with a social motive would improve their prospective memory performance. Accordingly, CIND and controls were asked to perform a prospective memory task which includes one of the following three conditions: a reward (i.e., a candy bar), no feedback, or a social motive (i.e., that performing the prospective memory task would be a favor for the experimenter). The participants also rated their commitment to achieve the three prospective conditions. Results showed lower prospective memory in CIND than in controls. Unlike controls, CIND did not benefit from the social motive; however, both populations demonstrated commitment toward this condition relative to the "reward" or "control" conditions. Although social motivation did not ameliorate prospective memory, CIND seem to demonstrate commitment to perform prospective memory tasks that involve social benefits for others.

Aftereffects and deactivation of completed prospective memory intentions: A systematic review

Prospective memory, the ability to perform an intended action in the future, is an essential aspect of goal-directed behavior. Intentions influence our behavior and shape the way we process and interact with our environment. One important question for research on prospective memory and goal-directed behavior is whether this influence stops after the intention has been completed successfully. Are intention representations deactivated from memory after their completion, and if so, how? Here, we systematically review 20 years of research on intention deactivation and so-called aftereffects of completed intentions across different research fields to offer an integrative perspective on this topic. We first introduce the currently dominant accounts of aftereffects (inhibition vs. retrieval) and illustrate the paradigms, findings, and interpretations that these accounts developed from. We then review the evidence for each account based on the extant research in these paradigms. While early studies proposed a rapid deactivation or even inhibition of completed intentions, more recent studies mostly suggested that intentions continue to be retrieved even after completion and interfere with subsequent performance. Although these accounts of aftereffects seem mutually exclusive, we will show that they might be two sides of the same coin. That is, intention deactivation and the occurrence of aftereffects are modulated by a multitude of factors that either foster a rapid deactivation or lead to continued retrieval of completed intentions. Lastly, we outline future directions and novel experimental procedures for research on mechanisms and modulators of intention deactivation and discuss practical implications of our findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

When we must forget: the effect of cognitive load on prospective memory commission errors

Recent studies consistently show that prospective memory (PM) intentions are not always deactivated when no-longer needed and might be erroneously performed upon encountering the once relevant cue - termed PM commission errors. However, empirical evidence on the potential mechanisms that might lead to this kind of memory failure remains mostly unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the influence of the ongoing task demands on PM deactivation of non-performed intentions. Younger adults, except for those in the no-PM condition, were asked to perform a PM task and were then told that the intention was finished. Later, they perform a lexical decision task with some trials containing (irrelevant) PM cues while simultaneously carrying out a counting recall task with two levels of difficulty. The results showed a higher risk of PM commission errors under moderate cognitive load (74%) as compared to the no-load condition (40%). Results also show that commission error risk did not increase in the high-load (54%) compared with the moderate-load condition. Furthermore, comparisons of the ongoign task performance between the no-PM condition and the other conditions with a PM task requirement support that commission errors might arise from a spontaneous PM retrieval. The implications of these findings are discussed within the dual-mechanisms account.