The ability to utilize cognitive support in the form of self-generated cues in mild Alzheimer's disease (AD), and the factors promoting efficient cue utilization in this group of patients, were examined in two experiments on memory for words. Results from both experiments showed that normal old adults as well as AD patients performed better with self-generated cues than with experimenter-provided cues, although the latter type of cues resulted in gains relative to free recall. The findings indicate no qualitative differences in patterns of performance between the normal old and the AD patients. For both groups of subjects, cue effectiveness was optimized when (a) there was self-generation activity at encoding, and (b) encoding and retrieval conditions were compatible.
This study investigated the effects of prior knowledge on recognition memory in patients with a mild Alzheimer's disease. Normal older adults and mildly demented patients were presented with dated and contemporary famous faces with name tags and were asked to generate unique statements about each person. Results indicated that both groups generated more statements about the dated than about the contemporary figures. Most important, both groups performed better with the dated than with the contemporary faces in an unexpected episodic face recognition task. This pattern of results suggests that both groups (a) possess more knowledge of dated than of contemporary famous individuals and (b) are able to utilize prior knowledge to enhance episodic remembering. Viewing these results in light of other recent work, it is concluded that differences between normal old and mildly demented individuals in the ability to utilize cognitive support for remembering may be differences in degree.
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