We examined whether words studied in one modality (visual or auditory) would prime performance in the opposite modality in five different perceptual implicit memory tests: auditory perceptual identification, auditory stem completion, visual perceptual identification, visual stem completion, and visual fragment completion. Significant transfer across modality was observed in all five tasks. However, a large proportion of the subjects reported using explicit retrieval strategies during the implicit tests. Those subjects who claimed not to have used explicit retrieval processes during the test phase demonstrated transfer across modalities in the stem completion tests and the perceptual identification tests, but not in the fragment completion test. The results indicate that implicit visual word-fragment completion is unique, in the sense that it relies exclusively on perceptual memory processes, whereas the other tasks rely, in part, on nonperceptual memory processes.

No abstract

No abstract

Recognition memory was tested in patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a language based dementia with relative preservation of memory for at least the first 2 years. The goal of the study was two-fold: (1) to compare true and false recognition rates for words versus pictures in patients with PPA and cognitively intact controls and (2) to determine if the semantic relatedness of distracters-to-targets influences recognition memory performance. Overall, performance of PPA patients was worse for words than pictures. PPA patients and healthy elderly controls showed similar recognition rates for studied items. However, the patients had significantly more false alarms than controls, particularly to semantically related items. This suggests that the aphasia in PPA patients contributes to their difficulty in selecting among items within a semantic class.