Effect of emotional valence on true and false recognition controlling arousal.

The aim of our experiment was to analyse the effect of the emotional valence (positive, negative, or neutral) on true and false recognition, matching the arousal, frequency, concreteness, and associative strength of the study and recognition words. Fifty younger adults and 46 healthy older adults performed three study tasks (with words of different valence: positive, negative, neutral) and their corresponding recognition tests. Two weeks later, they performed the three recognition tests again.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Intervention in Alzheimer's Disease and Its Follow-Up.

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) stands as the prevailing type of dementia, marked by gradual memory loss and cognitive decline. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method used to regulate cortical brain function and has been explored as a potential treatment for cognitive impairment.

Objective: This study aimed to compare the effects of daily home-based active or sham tDCS on cognitive function in patients with early-stage AD and its follow-up after one month.

Home-based transcranial direct current stimulation in mild neurocognitive disorder due to possible Alzheimer's disease. A randomised, single-blind, controlled-placebo study.

Introduction: Mild neurocognitive disorder (mNCD), a pre-dementia stage close to Mild Cognitive Impairment, shows a progressive and constant decline in the memory domain. Of the non-pharmacological therapeutic interventions that may help to decelerate the neurodegenerative progress, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) shows beneficial effects on the learning curve, immediate recall, immediate verbal memory and executive functions. The purpose of this research was to study the effect of tDCS on general cognition, immediate and delayed memory and executive functions by comparing an active group with a placebo group of mNCD patients.

Enhancing Immediate Memory, Potential Learning, and Working Memory with Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Healthy Older Adults.

Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a prevention method or minimizer of the normal cognitive deterioration that occurs during the aging process. tDCS can be used to enhance cognitive functions such as immediate memory, learning, or working memory in healthy subjects. The objective of this study was to analyze the effect of two 20-min sessions of anodal transcranial direct stimulation on immediate memory, learning potential, and working memory in healthy older adults.

A Longitudinal Study of Episodic and Semantic Autobiographical Memory in aMCI and Alzheimer's Disease Patients.

Background: The main objective of this study was to analyze the evolution of autobiographical memory (both episodic and semantic) in patients with mild cognitive impairment, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and a healthy control group. We compared these groups at two time points: first, at baseline, and in a follow-up after 18 months.

Method: Twenty-six healthy older adults, 17 patients with mild amnestic cognitive impairment, and 16 patients with Alzheimer's disease, matched on age and educational level, were evaluated at both time points with the Autobiographical Memory Interview.

Effectiveness of tDCS at Improving Recognition and Reducing False Memories in Older Adults.

Background: False memories tend to increase in healthy and pathological aging, and their reduction could be useful in improving cognitive functioning. The objective of this study was to use an active-placebo method to verify whether the application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) improved true recognition and reduced false memories in healthy older people.

Method: Participants were 29 healthy older adults (65-78 years old) that were assigned to either an active or a placebo group; the active group received anodal stimulation at 2 mA for 20 min over F7.

Phonological false recognition, recollection, and familiarity in healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Thirty healthy older people, 20 Alzheimer's disease patients (matched on age and education level) and 33 young people, participated in an experiment to implicitly induce phonological false memories, allowing us to obtain estimates of their recollection, familiarity, and false recognition.

Method: In the study task, words were selected which used half of the letters in the alphabet. In the recognition test, there were three types of non-studied new words: critical lures using letters from the same half of the alphabet as the study task words; distractors formed using the unused half of the alphabet, and distractors formed using all the letters in the alphabet.

Executive Functions, Episodic Autobiographical Memory, Problem-Solving Capacity, and Depression Proposal for a Structural Equations Model.

The executive functions play an important role in storing and recovering autobiographical memories, especially episodic memories. These types of memories provide information about solutions and experiences from the past that can be utilized as examples in the present when seeking solutions to any problem. In addition, a close relationship between depression and the executive functions has been widely recognized.

Type of memory and emotional valence in healthy aging, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Autobiographical memory (AM) presents components related to the type of memory and may present an associated emotional valence. Comparing healthy older adults, adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD) gives contradictory results. We examined AM in these groups to analyze differences and provide information that would contribute to the understanding of AM and associated emotional deficits in patients.

Are semantic and episodic autobiographical memories influenced by the life period remembered? Comparison of young and older adults.

Autobiographical memory consists of a person's personal history and contributes to building a feeling of identity and continuity. Aging affects episodic autobiographical memory negatively, whereas semantic autobiographical memory is preserved or even enhanced in older adults. The study aim was to analyze whether these hypotheses continue to find support, or if there are differences when these memories are analyzed according to the components of life cycle retrieval.

Phonological false recognition produced by bottom-up automatic activation in young and older people.

Two experiments explored a new procedure to implicitly induce phonological false memories in young and older people. On the study tasks, half of the words were formed from half of the letters in the alphabet, whereas the remaining words were formed from all the letters in the alphabet. On the recognition tests, there were three types of non-studied new words: critical lures formed from the same half of the letters as the studied words; distractors formed from the other half of the letters not used, and distractors formed from all the letters in the alphabet.

Wellbeing, resilience, and coping: Are there differences between healthy older adults, adults with mild cognitive impairment, and adults with Alzheimer-type dementia?

The changes that occur with cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease could affect psychological aspects unrelated to memory. The purpose of this study is to compare 32 healthy older adults, 31 amnestic mild cognitively impaired (aMCI) adults, and 32 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), in order to determine whether there are differences in their psychological wellbeing, resilience, and coping strategies. Unifactorial MANOVAS and ANOVAS were performed to analyze the between-group differences.

Motivated forgetting reduces veridical memories but slightly increases false memories in both young and healthy older people.

The aim of the current study is to examine the effects of motivated forgetting and aging on true and false memory. Sixty young and 54 healthy older adults were instructed to study two lists of 18 words each. Each list was composed of three sets of six words associated with three non-presented critical words.

Effects of Stimuli Repetition and Age in False Recognition.

The aim of the current study is to examine the effects of stimuli repetition and age in false recognition using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott experimental paradigm. Two matched samples of 32 young adults and 32 healthy older adults studied 10 lists of six words associated with three non-presented critical words. On half of the lists, the words were presented once, and on the other five lists, the words were presented three times, always following a same sequential order.

The Role of Recollection and Familiarity in Nondemented Parkinson's Patients.

The aim of the current study was to examine if recollection and familiarity decline in nondemented Parkinson's patients. To do so we compared a sample of older people with Parkinson's disease (n = 32) to a control sample of healthy older people (n = 32) on an associative recognition task in which we manipulated the repetition of the pairs during the study phase (half of the pairs were presented once and half twice) to obtain corrected estimates of recollection, familiarity, and false recognition based on the logic of the process-dissociation procedure. The results clearly show that recollection is impaired but familiarity is preserved in nondemented Parkinson's patients.

The role of self-referencing in true and false recognition in young people and healthy older people.

Background: Given the uneven results about the role self-referencing plays in false recognition, we planned an experiment that would allow us to analyze whether self-referencing affects false recognition, and its relationship with healthy aging.

Method: A sample of healthy older people (n = 30) and another sample of young people (n = 38) rated whether 40 personality-trait adjectives (20 with a positive valence and 20 with a negative valence) described them or not (self-referencing condition). They then took a recognition test of these adjectives along with 40 other new adjectives.

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.

Given the uneven experimental results in the literature regarding whether or not familiarity declines with healthy aging and cognitive impairment, we compare four samples (healthy young people, healthy older people, older people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment - aMCI -, and older people with Alzheimer's disease - AD -) on an associative recognition task, which, following the logic of the process-dissociation procedure, allowed us to obtain corrected estimates of recollection, familiarity and false recognition. The results show that familiarity does not decline with healthy aging, but it does with cognitive impairment, whereas false recognition increases with healthy aging, but declines significantly with cognitive impairment. These results support the idea that the deficits detected in recollection, familiarity, or false recognition in older people could be used as early prodromal markers of cognitive impairment.

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

We present an associative recognition experiment comparing three samples of healthy people (young people, older people with high cognitive reserve [HCR], and older people with low cognitive reserve [LCR], with each sample consisting of 40 people), manipulating stimuli repetition during the study phase. The results show significant differences among the three samples in their overall performance. However, these differences are not due to a different use of familiarity, but rather due to a different way of using recollection: although there are no differences in the hit rates between the HRC and LRC samples, the LCR group makes significantly more recollective false alarms than the HCR group.

Associative and Implicit Memory Performance as a Function of Cognitive Reserve in Elderly Adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment.

This study aims to analyze implicit and explicit memory performance as a function of cognitive reserve (CR) in a healthy control group (N = 39) and a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) group (N = 37). Both groups were subdivided into high and low cognitive reserve, and were asked to complete an explicit and implicit associative recognition tasks. The results showed that the control group was able to learn both tasks (η2 = .

An overall decline both in recollection and familiarity in healthy aging.

Background: In the area of recognition memory, the experimental data have been inconsistent about whether or not familiarity declines in healthy aging. A recent meta-analysis concluded that familiarity is impaired when estimated with the remember-know procedure, but not with the process-dissociation procedure.

Method: We present an associative recognition experiment with remember-know judgments that allow us to estimate both recollection and familiarity using both procedures in the same task and with the same participants (a sample of healthy older people and another sample of young people).

False memories in Lewy-body disease.

Recently, de Boysson, Belleville, Phillips et al. (2011) found that patients with Lewy-body disease (LBD) showed significantly lower rates of false memories than healthy controls, using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) experimental procedure. Given that this result could be explained by the practically null rate of true recognition in the LBD group (0.

Repetition increases false recollection in older people.

Aging is accompanied by an increase in false alarms on recognition tasks, and these false alarms increase with repetition in older people (but not in young people). Traditionally, this increase was thought to be due to a greater use of familiarity in older people, but it was recently pointed out that false alarms also have a clear recollection component in these people. The main objective of our study is to analyze whether the expected increase in the rate of false alarms in older people due to stimulus repetition is produced by an inadequate use of familiarity, recollection, or both processes.

The role of perceptual information in familiarity-based scene recognition.

A method to analyze the role of familiarity in recognizing pictures of everyday scenes is introduced. The idea is to manipulate two within-subjects conditions: an experimental condition where the scenes repeat perceptual information (e.g.

Recognition memory deficits in mild cognitive impairment.

There is no agreement on the pattern of recognition memory deficits characteristic of patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Whereas lower performance in recollection is the hallmark of MCI, there is a strong controversy about possible deficits in familiarity estimates when using recognition memory tasks. The aim of this research is to shed light on the pattern of responding in recollection and familiarity in MCI.