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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 and others have
previously shown that after correcting for unrelated false alarms,
AD patients exhibit lower levels of false recognition of
semantically associated words compared to healthy older adults. To
investigate whether this finding is attributable to semantic memory
impairments in AD patients, we examined false recognition of
semantically and phonologically related words in AD patients, older
adults, and young adults. Using corrected recognition scores to
control for unrelated false alarms, AD patients exhibited lower
levels of true and false recognition of both semantically and
phonologically related words compared with older adults.
Implications for semantic and episodic memory in AD patients are
discussed.
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