Priming older adults and people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease problem-solving with false memories

Mark L Howe,Shazia Akhtar

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.01.014

Abstract

In two experiments we investigated whether older adult controls (OACs) and people with mild and moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) benefit from false memory priming effects in subsequent problem-solving tasks. In addition, and unlike in previous false memory priming studies with older adults, we examined latency measures in the recognition phase. In Experiment 1 participants were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been preceded by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists whose critical lures (CLs) were also the solutions to those problems. In Experiment 2, we used a similar paradigm but investigated whether CLs could prime solutions to subsequent analogical reasoning problems. In this latter experiment, we also examined whether these priming effects were stronger when the activation of the CL term occurred during the memory task (was presented as part of the list; i.e., true memories) or when these items were not presented but arose during encoding due to spreading activation (i.e., false memories). We found that all three groups' performance on these tasks was facilitated only by false memories spontaneously generated from the prior presentation of DRM lists. That is, performance on CRATs and analogical reasoning tasks was better (greater accuracy and faster speed) when those problems were preceded by DRM lists whose CLs also served as the solution to those problems. These findings are consistent with previous results from studies with children, young adults, and older adults and extends them to people with more moderate AD.

Highlights

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition which is characterized by a reduction in learning and memory performance as well as rapid forgetting of new information
We showed the positive consequences of false memories in people with mild AD and older adult controls (OACs) in Akhtar et al and Akhtar and Howe (2019), here we replicated these findings and extended them to people with moderate Alzheimer’s Disease
Across both experiments using two different types of problem-solving tasks, we found that all three groups’ performance on these tasks was facilitated by self-generated false memories that arose from the prior presentation of DRM lists

Summary

Introduction

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition which is characterized by a reduction in learning and memory performance as well as rapid forgetting of new information. Whereas explicit memory tasks require participants to consciously recall or recognize recently processed information, implicit memory tasks do not. One way of demonstrating this episodic deficit is with tests of recognition, where participants have to differentiate old items (what they have previously studied) from new items (what they did not study earlier). In this case, participants with AD tend to correctly recognize fewer old items than controls. Participants with AD tend to correctly recognize fewer old items than controls They make more false positive errors (incorrectly judging a new item to be old) than healthy older control participants. This combined problem of relatively low hits and high false positives is interesting because it PRIMING PROBLEM SOLUTIONS WITH FALSE MEMORIES! 5!

Methods

Results

Conclusion