title: Increasing the salience of fluency cues does not reduce the recognition memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease!
abstract: In Alzheimer's disease (AD), it is now well established that recollection is impaired from the beginning of the disease, whereas findings are less clear concerning familiarity. One of the most important mechanisms underlying familiarity is the sense of familiarity driven by processing fluency. In this study, we attempted to attenuate recognition memory deficits in AD by maximizing the salience of fluency cues in two conditions of a recognition memory task. In one condition, targets and foils have been created from the same pool of letters (Overlap condition). In a second condition, targets and foils have been derived from two separate pools of letters (No-Overlap condition), promoting the use of letter-driven visual and phonetic fluency. Targets and foils were low-frequency words. The memory tasks were performed by 15 patients with AD and 16 healthy controls. Both groups improved their memory performance in the No-Overlap condition compared to the Overlap condition. Patients with AD were able to use fluency cues during recognition memory as older adults did, but this did not allow to compensate for dysfunction of recognition memory processes.
authors.affiliation: GIGA - CRC In vivo Imaging, University of Liege, Belgium.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.affiliation: GIGA - CRC In vivo Imaging, University of Liege, Belgium.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bastin
authors.affiliation: GIGA - CRC In vivo Imaging, University of Liege, Belgium.|Memory Clinics, Hospital Center of Liege, Belgium.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Salmon
authors.affiliation: Psychological and Speech Therapy Consultation Center, CPLU, University of Liege, Belgium.
authors.forename: Sylvie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Willems
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications* / Q000523:psychology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Alzheimer's disease; familiarity; fluency processing; recognition memory