title: Degree of cognitive impairment and the dissociation of implicit and explicit memory.
abstract: One group of normal elderly adults and two groups of cognitively impaired elderly adults were compared on an implicit and an explicit memory task. Degree of impairment affected explicit memory; the mildly and moderately impaired elderly adults demonstrated significantly reduced recognition performance. Degree of impairment also affected implicit memory priming performance, particularly for low frequency items, as measured by a word completion task. Explicit memory performance declined for both cognitively impaired groups, but implicit memory performance was sensitive to the degree or severity of impairment, causing a decline in performance only in the moderately impaired group.
authors.affiliation: Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
authors.forename: R E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Landrum
authors.forename: R C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Radtke
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D003704:Dementia / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D008609:Mental Status Schedule; D014706:Verbal Learning