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Abstract:
Abstract: Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) suffer from
distortions of memory that may impair their ability to live
independently. False recognition is a type of memory distortion in
which one mistakenly claims to have previously encountered a novel
item that is related to a studied item. We have previously shown
that healthy elderly adults--but not AD patients--can suppress
their false recognition of semantic associates across multiple
study-test trials. Previous work in our laboratory has shown that
false recognition in elderly adults can be greatly suppressed if
subjects study pictorial representations of each study item
presented by auditory modality. Schacter et al. (1999) hypothesized
that this suppression occurs because pictorial encoding enables
elderly subjects to employ a distinctiveness heuristic, whereby
subjects have access to distinctive details about a studied item
and are more likely to reject related lures that do not support
their detailed recollections. The goal of our research was to
investigate whether AD patients could also employ such a heuristic
to suppress their false recognition. Preliminary results suggest
that while elderly adults are able to use a distinctiveness
heuristic to reduce their level of false recognition, AD patients
can not.
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