0000000000133201
AUTHOR
Lucia Fadda
Lexical and conceptual components of stem completion priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease
This study evaluated the hypothesis of dissociation between normal lexical but deficient conceptual repetition priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). For this purpose, we administered to patients with AD and age-matched normal controls the Stem Completion task. In Experiment 1, the level of word processing during study was manipulated by requiring subjects to count vowels (graphemic condition) or generate meanings (semantic condition) of target words. In Experiment 2, the presentation modality was varied during the study to obtain an intramodal and crossmodal repetition priming. Probably due to a floor effect of performance in the graphemic condition, in Experiment 1, AD patient…
Recognition memory for single items and for associations in amnesic patients
Recognition memory performance reflects two distinct processes or types of memory referred to as recollection and familiarity. According to theoretical claims about the two types of memory, single item and associative recognition tasks can be used as an experimental method to distinguish recollection and familiarity processes. Associative recognition decisions can be used as an index of recollection while memory for single items is mostly based on familiarity judgement. We employed this procedure to examine a possible dissociation in the memory performance of amnesic patients between spared single item and impaired associative recognition. Twelve amnesic patients, six with damage confined t…
Selective sparing of face learning in a global amnesic patient
Objective - To test the hypothesis that visual memory for faces can be dissociated from visual memory for topographical material. Method - A patient who developed a global amnesic syndrome after acute carbon monoxide poisoning is described. A neuroradiological examination documented severe bilateral atrophy of the hippocampi. Results - Despite a severe anterograde memory disorder involving verbal information, abstract figures, concrete objects, topographical scenes, and spatial information, the patient was still able to learn previously unknown human faces at a normal (and, in some cases, at a higher) rate. Conclusions - Together with previous neuropsychological evidence documenting selecti…
Recollection and familiarity in hippocampal amnesia
Currently, there is a general agreement that two distinct cognitive operations, recollection and familiarity, contribute to performance on recognition memory tests. However, there is a controversy about whether recollection and familiarity reflect different memory processes, mediated by distinct neural substrates (dual-process models), or whether they are the expression of memory traces of different strength in the context of a unitary declarative memory system (unitary-strength models). Critical in this debate is the status of recognition memory in hippocampal amnesia and, in particular, whether the various structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) contribute differentially to the recol…
Selective proper name anomia in a patient with asymmetric cortical degeneration
All cases of selective anomic deficit for proper names described until now are a consequence of focal cerebral lesions. In the present paper, we report the case of a patient, AF, with a deficient access to proper names of persons and normal access to common names probably subsumed by a degenerative process of the left cerebral hemisphere. MRI evidenced an atrophy of the left temporal lobe and SPECT highlighted hypoperfusion of the left hemisphere. Neuropsychological examination documented a deficient production of proper names belonging to famous personalities both on visual presentation and verbal definition. Moreover, on verbal fluency tasks, AF was poor for the categories of famous peopl…
Intact cross-modality text-specific repetition priming in patients with Alzheimer’s disease
This study was aimed at investigating the basic mechanisms of the normal repetition priming evoked by text re-reading procedures in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients (Monti, Gabrieli, Wilson, & Reminger, 1994; Monti et al., 1997). For this purpose, we contrasted the reading facilitation elicited by previous reading or listening to a text in a sample of AD patients and a group of age-matched normal controls. Consistent with previous evidence in normal undergraduates (Levy & Kirsner, 1989), previous listening to a text decreased the successive reading time of the same text (cross-modality priming). However, the reading facilitation elicited by previous reading of the same text (within…