title: Associative memory and its cerebral correlates in Alzheimer׳s disease: evidence for distinct deficits of relational and conjunctive memory.
abstract: This study investigated the impact of Alzheimer׳s disease (AD) on conjunctive and relational binding in episodic memory. Mild AD patients and controls had to remember item-color associations by imagining color either as a contextual association (relational memory) or as a feature of the item to be encoded (conjunctive memory). Patients׳ performance in each condition was correlated with cerebral metabolism measured by FDG-PET. The results showed that AD patients had an impaired capacity to remember item-color associations, with deficits in both relational and conjunctive memory. However, performance in the two kinds of associative memory varied independently across patients. Partial Least Square analyses revealed that poor conjunctive memory was related to hypometabolism in an anterior temporal-posterior fusiform brain network, whereas relational memory correlated with metabolism in regions of the default mode network. These findings support the hypothesis of distinct neural systems specialized in different types of associative memory and point to heterogeneous profiles of memory alteration in Alzheimer׳s disease as a function of damage to the respective neural networks.
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium. Electronic address: Christine.Bastin@ulg.ac.be.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bastin
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Mohamed Ali
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Bahri
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Miévis
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lemaire
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Fabienne
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Collette
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Genon
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.affiliation: Centre Hospitalier du Bois de l׳Abbaye et de Hesbaye, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Bénédicte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Guillaume
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
authors.forename: Rachel A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Diana
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
authors.forename: Andrew P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Yonelinas
authors.affiliation: Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Allée du 6 Août, B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium; Memory Clinic, CHU Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Salmon
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism*; D005260:Female; D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography
chemical_list: D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18
keywords: Alzheimer׳s disease; Associative memory; Binding; FDG-PET