title: Preserved conceptual priming in Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: We assessed Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy older adult control (HC) group performance on: (1) a conceptual priming task, in which participants had to make a semantic decision as to whether a degraded picture of an object encountered previously belonged to the category of living or non-living things; and (2) a recognition memory task. The AD group showed a dissociation between impaired performance on the recognition task and preserved priming for semantic decisions to degraded pictures. We argue that it is not whether priming is conceptual or perceptual that is important for the observation of priming in AD, rather it is the nature of the response that is required (c.f., Gabrieli et al., 1999).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, UK. carla.martins@gmail.com
authors.forename: Carla A R
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Martins
authors.forename: Toby J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Lloyd-Jones
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications* / Q000523:psychology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D002965:Classification; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012016:Reference Values; D012660:Semantics