The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

Full Text of this Article
in Japanese PDF (244K)

ArticleTitle	Related and unrelated false recall in a word recall task in patients with Alzheimer's disease
Language	J
AuthorList	Chisato Uchiyama¹⁾, Yohei Uema¹⁾, Shotaro Murata²⁾, Takuya Sato²⁾, Toru Imamura¹⁾³⁾
Affiliation	¹⁾Department of Speech Therapy, School of Health Sciences, Niigata University of Health and Welfare ²⁾Division of Speech Therapy, Department of Rehabilitation, Niigata Rehabilitation Hospital ³⁾Department of Neurology, Niigata Rehabilitation Hospital
Publication	Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 29 (2), 126-132, 2013
Received	Jan 25, 2012
Accepted	Sep 20, 2012
Abstract	Objectives: To evaluate the factors that may be associated with related and unrelated false recall in a word recall task in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Subjects: 172 patients with AD who underwent the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS). The mean age of the patients was 80.4±6.1 years and the mean score of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) was 19.1±4.4. Methods: We classified the falsely recalled words in the word recall task of the ADAS into two groups; words which belonged to one of the same semantic categories of the target words were regarded as related words and the other words were regarded as unrelated words. Then, the patients were classified into four groups; patients without false recall, patients with related false recall only, patients with unrelated false recall only, and patients with both related and unrelated false recall. We compared the demographic, clinical and cognitive characteristics among the first three groups with analyses of variance and post hoc comparisons. Results: The mean score of the word recognition task in patients with related false recall was significantly better than that in patients with unrelated false recall and that in patients without false recall. Conclusions: The results suggested that the processes of memory encoding were relatively unimpaired in patients with related false recall. Related false recall may be associated to the activation and encoding of semantically related words during the encoding processes of target words. On the other hand, the results suggested that unrelated false recall was based on the mechanism different from that for related recall. Unrelated false recall may not prepare in the encoding process but may occur in the process of retrieval.
Keywords	false memory, Alzheimer's disease assessment scale (ADAS), word recall task, related false recall, unrelated false recall