title: Visual personal familiarity in amnestic mild cognitive impairment.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment are at high risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. Besides episodic memory dysfunction they show deficits in accessing contextual knowledge that further specifies a general concept or helps to identify an object or a person.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural networks associated with the perception of personal familiar faces and places in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and healthy control subjects. Irrespective of stimulus type, patients compared to control subjects showed lower activity in right prefrontal brain regions when perceiving personally familiar versus unfamiliar faces and places. Both groups did not show different neural activity when perceiving faces or places irrespective of familiarity.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our data highlight changes in a frontal cortical network associated with knowledge-based personal familiarity among patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment. These changes could contribute to deficits in social cognition and may reduce the patients' ability to transition from basic to complex situations and tasks.
authors.affiliation: Division of Old Age Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany. luisa.jurjanz@uniklinikum-dresden.de
authors.forename: Luisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jurjanz
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Donix
authors.forename: Eva C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Amanatidis
authors.forename: Shirin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Meyer
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Poettrich
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Huebner
authors.forename: Damaris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Baeumler
authors.forename: Michael N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Smolka
authors.forename: Vjera A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Holthoff
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000647:Amnesia / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D014796:Visual Perception