Abstract
Background: False memories tend to increase in healthy and pathological aging, and their reduction could be useful in improving cognitive functioning. The objective of this study was to use an active–placebo method to verify whether the application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) improved true recognition and reduced false memories in healthy older people. Method: Participants were 29 healthy older adults (65–78 years old) that were assigned to either an active or a placebo group; the active group received anodal stimulation at 2 mA for 20 min over F7. An experimental task was used to estimate true and false recognition. The procedure took place in two sessions on two consecutive days. Results: True recognition showed a significant main effect of sessions (p < 0.01), indicating an increase from before treatment to after it. False recognition showed a significant main effect of sessions (p < 0.01), indicating a decrease from before treatment to after it and a significant session × group interaction (p < 0.0001). Conclusions: Overall, our results show that tDCS was an effective tool for increasing true recognition and reducing false recognition in healthy older people, and suggest that stimulation improved recall by increasing the number of items a participant could recall and reducing the number of memory errors.
Highlights
Published: 1 February 2021Human memory is susceptible to distortions, illusions, and false memories that tend to increase during both healthy and pathological aging [1], especially in the face of events that share perceptual or conceptual characteristics
The true recognition estimates for each participant were derived by subtracting the proportion of false alarms on words with the same letters, as in the study list, from the proportion of hits, whereas in the entire condition, the true recognition estimates were derived by subtracting the proportion of false alarms on words with all the letters in the alphabet from the proportion of hits as a way to control the response bias of the participants [29,30]
× group interaction showed that (a) the true recognition means of the treatment and control groups did not significantly differ before the treatment (M = 0.46 and M = 0.58, respectively; t(27) = 1.85, p > 0.05); (b) the true recognition mean of the treatment group was significantly higher than the mean of the control group after treatment
Summary
Published: 1 February 2021Human memory is susceptible to distortions, illusions, and false memories that tend to increase during both healthy and pathological aging [1], especially in the face of events that share perceptual or conceptual characteristics. It is important to minimize these false memories in order to carry out daily activities, such as remembering whether one took their medication, turned off the fire when cooking, closed the door before leaving, or just thought about it. Maintaining a functional episodic memory system is vital for preserving a high quality of life with age, with regard to independent living [2]. There are obvious benefits if false memories can be reduced temporarily in certain circumstances. Evidence from injury studies has identified the medial temporal lobe (MTL), the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), as critical brain structures for coding and retrieving episodic memory [3]. Decreased hippocampal volume is associated with reduced memory performance [4], and a decreased anterior, dorsolateral, and ventrolateral
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