Picture priming in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease

Résumé 0

"Picture priming in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease. The present study investigated age invariancefor naming pictures and whether implicit memory is spared in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). During thestudy phase, young adults, AD patients, and older controls were shown outlines of familiar pictures.After a distracter task, implicit memory was assessed incidentally. The results showed similar visualpriming for the three groups, although young adults responded faster than the two older groups. Moreover,the number of errors was smaller for studied than for nonstudied pictures. This pattern of resultswas repeated across the three groups, although AD patients produced more errors than young adultsand older controls, and there were no differences between these latter groups. These results confirmedprevious visual and haptic findings showing unimpaired perceptual priming in normal aging and ADpatients when implicit memory is assessed using identification tasks. These results are interpreted froma cognitive neuroscience perspective."