The Effects of Healthy Aging, Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer’s Disease on Recollection and Familiarity: A Meta-Analytic Review

Abstract

It is well established that healthy aging, amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are associated with substantial declines in episodic memory. However, there is still debate as to how two forms of episodic memory – recollection and familiarity – are affected by healthy and pathological aging. To address this issue we conducted a meta-analytic review of the effect sizes reported in studies using remember/know (RK), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and process dissociation (PD) methods to examine recollection and familiarity in healthy aging (25 published reports), aMCI (9 published reports), and AD (5 published reports). The results from the meta-analysis revealed that healthy aging is associated with moderate-to-large recollection impairments. Familiarity was not impaired in studies using ROC or PD methods but was impaired in studies that used the RK procedure. aMCI was associated with large decreases in recollection whereas familiarity only tended to show a decrease in studies with a patient sample comprised of both single-domain and multiple-domain aMCI patients. Lastly, AD was associated with large decreases in both recollection and familiarity. The results are consistent with neuroimaging evidence suggesting that the hippocampus is critical for recollection whereas familiarity is dependent on the integrity of the surrounding perirhinal cortex. Moreover, the results highlight the relevance of method selection when examining aging, and suggest that familiarity deficits might be a useful behavioral marker for identifying individuals that will develop dementia.

Positivity effect specific to older adults with subclinical memory impairment

“…This is consistent with previous findings suggesting that aging is associated with decreased recollection and preserved familiarity, and also fits with computational approaches suggesting that older adults are more biased toward memory generalization at the expense of discrimination (Yassa and Stark 2011;Koen and Yonelinas 2014). However, we did not compare our sample to young adults, so it is unknown whether AU adults show similar performance to that of young adults.…”

The effects of healthy aging, amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease on recollection, familiarity and false recognition, estimated by an associative process-dissociation recognition procedure

“…According to the dual-process theories (e.g. Koen and Yonelinas, 2014;Schoemaker et al, 2014;Yonelinas, 2002), memory for a past experience can be based on a conscious recollection of contextual details from that experience or on an automatic estimation of the strength of that memory trace in the absence of contextual details (a sense of "déjà vu" or familiarity). These models assume that, whereas recollection is impaired in normal aging, familiarity is spared (e.g.…”

Differences in false recollection according to the cognitive reserve of healthy older people

“…Using it as dependent variable in a new ANOVA of 3 groups × 2 repetition conditions, the results revealed that the main effects and the interaction of the two variables were again non-significant. These results show that familiarity seems to be stable throughout a healthy life cycle (e.g., Algarabel et al, 2009;Koen & Yonelinas, 2014;Yonelinas, 2002).…”

“…Of the 60 pairs of stimuli presented on the recognition task, 10 corresponded to the non-repeated intact condition, 10 corresponded to the repeated intact condition, 10 corresponded to the non-repeated rearranged condition (randomly re-matching the stimuli in a different order from the one studied), 10 corresponded to the repeated rearranged condition (randomly re-matching the stimuli in a different order), and 20 corresponded to the new condition. Prior to performing the first recognition task, and following strict RK instructions (Koen & Yonelinas, 2014), the differences between "remembering" and "knowing" were explained to participants (see Kilb & Naveh-Benjamin, 2011, exp. 2), emphasizing that a remember response should only be given if they could communicate a retrieved detail to the experimenter if asked, whereas a know response should be given if they believed the pair had previously been studied, but they were unable to retrieve any specific details.…”

“…Some authors (Koen & Yonelinas, 2014;Yonelinas, 2002) argue that K judgments are not good estimators of true familiarity, proposing new methods to estimate it. For example, the independence method (Koen & Yonelinas, 2014;Yonelinas, 2002) proposes the result yielded by the formula (hits on K judgments)/(1 -hits on R judgments) as a good estimator of true familiarity. Using it as dependent variable in a new ANOVA of 3 groups × 2 repetition conditions, the results revealed that the main effects and the interaction of the two variables were again non-significant.…”