Abstract
Patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) not only are suffering from amnesia but also are prone to memory distortions, such as experiencing detailed and vivid recollections of episodic events that have never been encountered (i.e., false memories). To describe and explain these distortions, we offer a review to synthesize current knowledge on false memory in AD into a framework allowing for better understanding of the taxonomy and phenomenology of false memories and of the cognitive mechanisms that may underlie false memory formation in AD. According to this review, certain phenomenological characteristics of memories (e.g., high emotional load, high vividness, or high familiarity) result in misattributions in AD. More specifically, this review proposes that generalized decline in cognitive control and inhibition in AD may result in difficulties in suppressing irrelevant information during memory monitoring, especially when irrelevant (i.e., false) information is characterized by high emotion, vividness, or familiarity. This review also proposes that binding deficits in AD decrease the ability to retrieve relevant contextual details, leading to source monitoring errors and false memories. In short, this review depicts how phenomenological characteristics of memories and failures of monitoring during retrieval contribute to the occurrence of false memory in AD.
Highlights
Consider the following scenario, you are driving on a busy road when you perceive someone waiting at a bus stop
You may realize that you have never met this person before. This illustration shows how you may create a false memory about a stimulus or even about an entire episode
We cover a whole range of false memories in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), explain how phenomenological characteristics of information can influence memory misattributions, leading to false memory in AD, and offer a description of the cognitive mechanisms potentially underlying false memory in AD
Summary
You are driving on a busy road when you perceive someone waiting at a bus stop. The feeling of familiarity for the critical lure increased leading to a reduction of the ability of AD patients to control the source of the activation, leading to the high production of the critical lure for the ascending forward associative strength list These findings suggest how the order of presentation of information may provoke false item memory in AD patients. False item memory in AD, as observed in research using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, can be understood in light of a study by Gilet et al [13] who reported lower production of critical lures in AD patients than controls. We discuss phenomenological characteristics of false memories in AD to demonstrate how they contribute to the occurrence of false item memory, false context memory, and false autobiographical memory in the disease
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