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Abstract:
One approach to the cognitive changes that occur across the
life span and in individuals with Alzheimer's Disease is a
breakdown in the ability to control/inhibit partially activated but
inappropriate sources of activation. The processing of ambiguous
words is a natural testbed for such a problem. I will review the
results of single word processing and sentence processing studies
which suggest that individuals with AD do not inhibit contextually
inappropriate interpretations of homographs. Because of this lack
of suppression, it can be shown that AD individuals can actually
out perform healthy control individuals when the inappropriate
information must later be re-accessed. The implications of these
results for a general model of attentional control will be
discussed.
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