The Ownership Effect in Dementia Patients

Abstract

Abstract. Ownership of objects influences memory performance in healthy subjects, a phenomenon referred to as the ownership effect. In dementia patients, memory performance is severely impaired, yet it is not known whether memory performance can be enhanced using the ownership effect. In this contribution we investigated the influence of ownership on memory performance in dementia patients, using an adapted shopping task to induce artificial ownership. Dementia patients ( N = 32) fictitiously owned half of the objects presented to them on picture cards. Memory performance was tested using a forced-choice recognition task that also included novel objects. Corrected hit rates of owned and previously unowned objects were compared using analysis of variance. The corrected hit rate for objects fictitiously owned by dementia patients was significantly higher than the hit rate for unowned objects ( p = .027; partial η2 = .152). Results indicate a significant memory enhancement for objects fictitiously owned by dementia patients. Our findings suggest that the memory performance of dementia patients can be influenced using the ownership effect, and that this effect could be used to design interventions that try to improve memory performance for relevant information in dementia patients.