"Forget to whom you have told this proverb": directed forgetting of destination memory in Alzheimer's disease.

Mohamad El Haj,Philippe Allain,Luciano Fasotti,Marie-Charlotte Gandolphe,Pascal Antoine

doi:10.1155/2015/215971

Abstract

Destination memory is the ability to remember the receiver of transmitted information. By means of a destination memory directed forgetting task, we investigated whether participants with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) were able to suppress irrelevant information in destination memory. Twenty-six AD participants and 30 healthy elderly subjects were asked to tell 10 different proverbs to 10 different celebrities (List 1). Afterwards, half of the participants were instructed to forget the destinations (i.e., the celebrities) whereas the other half were asked to keep them in mind. After telling 10 other proverbs to 10 other celebrities (List 2), participants were asked to read numbers aloud. Subsequently, all the participants were asked to remember the destinations of List 1 and List 2, regardless of the forget or remember instructions. The results show similar destination memory in AD participants who were asked to forget the destinations of List 1 and those who were asked to retain them. These findings are attributed to inhibitory deficits, by which AD participants have difficulties to suppress irrelevant information in destination memory.

Highlights

Episodic memory decline has been proposed as the cognitive hallmark of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The results showed no effect of the forget instruction, since similar recall performances for List 1 were seen in the remember and the forget AD participants
The results showed no effect of forget instruction, since no differences were visible between the remember and the forget AD participants on retrieving the sources of List 1 items

Summary

Introduction

Episodic memory decline has been proposed as the cognitive hallmark of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) [1,2,3,4,5,6]. As observed in aging, is argued to saturate memory with too much information, this may result in competition between appropriate and inappropriate information at the moment of retrieval [7, 8]. In line with this idea, a compromised inhibitory ability was observed in several studies with subjects suffering from AD. In these studies, it was shown that AD participants have difficulties in suppressing irrelevant information in memory. This finding was investigated with the directed forgetting method [9,10,11]

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Conclusion