Successive memory test performance and priming in Alzheimer's disease: evidence from the word-fragment completion task.
This study assessed the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease and healthy controls in a successive memory test paradigm. Subjects studied lists of words. Following study, tests of recognition (an explicit memory task) and primed word fragment completion (an implicit memory task) were administered. Since the same words were used in the two tasks, we were able to calculate the degree of dependence between recognition performance and primed word fragment completion. AD patients evidenced impaired recognition memory. In contrast, priming was intact. The pattern of correlation between the two tasks was similar in healthy controls and in AD. Independence between recognition and fragment completion was obtained when recognition preceded the fragment completion task, but not when fragment completion preceded recognition.
Karlsson
Thomas
T
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden. tk@ibv.liu.se
Börjesson
Arne
A
Adolfsson
Rolf
R
Nilsson
Lars-Göran
LG
D000368:Aged; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008609:Mental Status Schedule; D008875:Middle Aged; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011932:Reading