Degenerative Amnesia for Past Public Events: An Attempt to Measure Storage and Retrieval.

A still unsettled issue of amnesia concerns the differential contributions to recall impairment of the underlying retrieval and storage abilities. The aim of the present study was to disentangle and to measure such roles in the recall of past public events comparing patients with degenerative amnesia and healthy elderly. The experiment included 44 healthy elderly and two groups of participants with degenerative amnesia, namely 17 patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and 22 mild Alzheimer's disease patients.

Long-term proper name anomia after removal of the uncinate fasciculus.

A previous study reporting on 44 patients who underwent awake surgery for a left frontal or temporal glioma resection demonstrated the removal of the uncinate fasciculus to have consequences on language 3 months post-surgery. At this time-point, patients with a temporal glioma who had undergone uncinate removal showed the worst overall performance with a significant impairment in naming of famous faces and objects compared to patients without removal. Also, verbal fluency was mildly impaired.

Autobiographical memory in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Autobiographical memory (ABM) was evaluated in 19 patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) by means of the standardized enquiry developed by Borrini et al. (Psychol Med 19:215-224, 1989). Longitudinal assessments were carried out by re-testing participants at 9-month intervals up to three assessments over 18 months.

Ambiguous idiom comprehension in Alzheimer's disease.

Ambiguous idiom comprehension was examined in 15 patients with mild probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) by means of two tasks: a string-to-picture matching task and a string-to-word matching task. In the first, patients had to choose among four pictures, while in the second they chose among four words. For both tasks the alternatives were the picture/word corresponding to the figurative meaning, a semantic associate (picture/word) to the last word of the idiom, and two unrelated alternatives, which were, in the case of words, an unrelated foil preserving the semantic class and a literal continuation foil (a word that can follow the verb in that sentence), while in the case of pictures the first was substituted by an unrealistic foil.