Gist memory in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from categorized pictures.

Abstract

The authors investigated gist memory (the general meaning, idea, or gist conveyed by a collection of items) for categorized color photographs in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) using an experimental paradigm in which participants are instructed to respond "yes" when a test item fits with a previously studied category, regardless of whether the specific item was actually studied. Compared with controls, the patients endorsed fewer studied items and similar numbers of nonstudied lure items. After the authors corrected for the baseline false-alarm rate, the patients showed a lower level of endorsements for nonstudied lure items compared with that of controls, suggesting that their gist memory is impaired. Implications of these findings for understanding gist memory and response bias in patients with AD are discussed.

Trichotomous processes in early memory development, aging, and neurocognitive impairment: A unified theory.

“…Of course, nothing specific is known about aging trends in reconstructive retrieval because this operation is not measured in conventional dual-process methodologies. However, when the idea that reconstruction is semantically based is combined with the well-established finding (Budson et al, 2006b;Kensinger & Schacter, 1999;Koutstaal, 2003;Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997) that semantic aspects of memory are more likely than verbatim aspects to be spared during healthy aging, an obvious expectation is that aging declines in direct access ought to be more pronounced than aging declines in reconstruction.…”

“…However, interpretation is aided by the fact that there is a developmental literature on recognition in which signal detection estimates of criterion stringency have been computed for subjects who have ranged in age from young children to older adults (both healthy and impaired subjects). The life-span pattern runs as follows: (a) Decision criteria become much more stringent between childhood and adolescence (e.g., Holliday & Weekes, 2006); (b) decision criteria become slightly more stringent between adolescence and young adulthood (e.g., Brainerd & Mojardin, 1998); (c) decision criteria remain invariant between young and late adulthood (e.g., Budson, Todman, & Schacter, 2006b); (d) decision criteria are less stringent for older adults who are cognitively impaired than for healthy older adults (e.g., Budson et al, 2006b). Thus, in light of the first element of this pattern, the most likely interpretation of the age-invariance result for the familiarity judgment parameters is not that familiarity is age-invariant but, rather, that familiarity and criterion stringency both increase with age and these increases cancel each other out at the level of parameter values.…”

Human memory research: Current hypotheses and new perspectives

“…Regarding the theoretical accounts for distortions of memories of emotional information, we hypothesize that two independent memory traces are responsible for true and false recognition in the DRM paradigm (see also Budson et al, 2006). This hypothesis is based on the Fuzzy Trace Theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005), which proposes that gist traces store the meaning of the experience, whereas verbatim traces store specific features of the experience.…”

“…Therefore, a decrease in false alarms to emotional lures was perhaps an effect of semantic incongruence with targets, a form of distinctiveness, rather than a specific effect of emotion on memory (Kensinger & Schacter, 2006;Schacter, Gallo, & Kensinger, 2007). Budson et al (2006), in a departure from the two previous studies, used lists containing both neutral and emotional words that were semantically associated in the study phase. Their findings indicated no effect of emotion on false memory reports.…”

“…Some of these studies have used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM; Roediger & McDermott, 1995), which was adapted to the Brazilian population (Stein & Perguer, 2001;Stein, Feix, & Rohenkohl, 2006), and was design to examine whether emotional critical lures could be falsely remembered (Budson et al, 2006;Kensinger & Corkin, 2004a;Pesta, Murphy, & Sanders, 2001). The DRM paradigm involves the presentation of lists of words (e.g., table, sit, legs, seat…), each of which is highly associated with a single, non-presented word (e.g., chair), referred to as the critical lure.…”