The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

Full Text of this Article
in Japanese PDF (44K)

ArticleTitle	Episodic memory in subject-performed tasks in Alzheimer's disease patients
Language	J
AuthorList	Kouhei Masumoto¹⁾, Tsuneo Takai²⁾
Affiliation	1) Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University 2) Health Care Facility for the Elderly, Yodogawa Christian Hospital
Publication	Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 18 (4), 239-246, 2002
Received	Jul 4, 2002
Accepted	Oct 3, 2002
Abstract	This study examines the encoding ability of verbal, visual and motor information of episodic memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients using 4 tasks: verbal tasks (VT), subject-performed tasks (SPT), verbal tasks/object (VT/O) and experimenter-performed tasks (EPT). Subjects were 15 young adults, 13 healthy elderly adults and 10 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. The AD patients and elderly adults were matched in the mean of age and education. In each task, subjects were required to memorize 10 (15 for young adults) action sentences (e.g., " hold a glass," "split disposable chopsticks," etc.) that the experimenter presented read aloud. In VT, subjects memorized only with action sentences. In SPT, subjects heard then performed each action sentence. In EPT, subjects memorized the action sentences whilst the observing experimenter performed the action of each sentence. In VT/O, subjects memorized action sentences whilst observing the object contained in each action sentence. Results indicated that recall performance in AD patients was lowest in all tasks, however, all groups of subjects performed significantly better for SPT than for VT/O, and better for VT/O than for VT. These results show that self-performance and observing objects enhanced recall performance in AD patients no less than in young adults and elderly adults. Moreover, it also became clear that the proportion of remembered errors at recall was lower for SPT than for VT and VT/O in all groups, and there was no statistical difference in the proportion of error among AD patients, elderly adults and young adults. These results show that self-performance promoted accuracy in the memorization of action sentences, and this effect was confirmed in AD patients. In conclusion, results of recall performance and recall error indicate that AD patients can utilize rich environment resources for encoding from several modalities (visual, auditory, tactile and motor sense) in SPT.
Keywords	Alzheimer's disease, episodic memory, subject-performed tasks, recall, error