Loss of distinctive features and a broader pattern of priming in Alzheimer's disease.
The results of 2 experiments support the contention that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show a relative loss of the semantic features that distinguish concepts from one another and that the representations of pairs of concepts consequently share a larger proportion of their associated features in AD than in normal aging. In Experiment 1, AD patients listed fewer features for a set of concepts than did healthy older adults and were more deficient at listing features if the features were distinctive to particular concepts than if they were shared by multiple concepts. In Experiment 2, AD patients showed online priming at levels of relatedness at which healthy older adults did not.
Alathari
Lina
L
Psychology Department, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA.
Trinh Ngo
Catherine
C
Dopkins
Stephen
S
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D008609:Mental Status Schedule; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics