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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Event-related brain potential evidence of spared knowledge in Alzheimer's disease | | Author(s) | Judith M Ford, Nusha Askari, John D E Gabrieli |
| Journal title | Psychology and Aging, vol 16, no 1, March 2001 |
| Pages | pp 161-176 |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Cognitive processes ; Memory and Reminiscence. |
| Annotation | The authors recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to picture primes and word targets (picture-name verification task) in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in older and younger participants. N400 (a negative-going component of ERP occurring about 400 milliseconds after a semantically unexpected final word of a sentence) was more negative to words that did not match pictures than to the words that did match pictures in all groups. In the young, the effect was significant at all scalp sites. In older people, it was only at central-parietal sites, and in AD patients, it was limited to right central-parietal sites. In AD patients pre-tested with a confrontation-naming task to identify pictures that they could not name, neither the N400 priming effect nor its scalp distribution was affected by ability to name pictures correctly. This ERP evidence of spared knowledge of these items was complemented by 80% performance accuracy. Thus, although the name of an item may be inaccessible in confrontation naming, N400 shows that knowledge is intact enough to prime cortical responses. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020111212 A |
| Classmark | EA: DA: DB |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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