Objective The imagination inflation effect is a type of memory distortion defined as an increased tendency to falsely remember that an item has been seen, or an action has been performed, when it has only been imagined. For patients with very mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD), susceptibility to the imagination inflation effect could have significant functional consequences in daily life. Method We assessed whether patients with very mild AD were more or less susceptible to the imagination inflation effect when compared to healthy older adults. In the first session, participants were read an action statement such as “fill the pillbox” and engaged in one of three activities: listened to the statement being read, performed the action, or imagined performing the action. During the second session, participants imagined action statements from the first session as well as new action statements. During the recognition test, participants were asked to determine whether action statements were or were not performed during the first session. Results We found that imagining performing actions increased the tendency of patients with very mild AD to falsely recall the action as having been performed to an extent similar to that of healthy older adults. Conclusion We concluded that, similar to healthy older adults, patients with very mild AD were susceptible to the imagination inflation effect, which we attributed to difficulties with source monitoring and reliance on familiarity.

Words can be pronounced in multiple ways in casual speech. Corpus analyses of the frequency with which these pronunciation variants occur (e.g., Patterson & Connine, 2001) show that typically, one pronunciation variant tends to predominate; this raises the question of whether variant recognition is aligned with exposure frequency. We explored this issue in words containing one of four phonological contexts, each of which favors one of four surface realizations of word-medial /t/: [t], [ʔ], [ɾ], or a deleted variant. The frequencies of the four realizations in all four contexts were estimated for a set of words in a production experiment. Recognition of all pronunciation variants was then measured in a lexical decision experiment. Overall, the data suggest that listeners are sensitive to variant frequency: Word classification rates closely paralleled production frequency. The exceptions to this were [t] realizations (i.e., canonical pronunciations of the words), a finding which confirms other results in the literature and indicates that factors other than exposure frequency affect word recognition.In casual speech, talkers pronounce words in ways that deviate from their canonical pronunciations. For example, talkers of American English often flap intervocalic /t/s. For some words (e.g., pretty), flapping occurs with such frequency that the flapped variant (e.g., [prɪɾi]) is much more common than its citation form (e.g., [prɪti]). For communication to succeed, listeners must learn to recognize these alternative pronunciations of words. How does this occur?A partial answer to this question is that learning occurs through exposure. Listeners encode the variation they experience to the degree (frequency) they experience it, thereby tuning their perceptual system to the pronunciation variability found in the environment (e.g., Connine, 2004;Connine, Ranbom, & Patterson, 2008; Ernestus & Baayen, 2007;Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006). Although there may be other means of recognizing pronunciation variants (generalization of rules), the ever-growing literature on statistical language learning (Gomez, 2007;Saffran, 2003) and exemplar theoretic models of language perception and production (Bybee, 2001;Johnson, 2006;Pierrehumbert, 2003) suggest that an experiencebased account is both plausible and likely.Correspondence information: Mark A. Pitt, Department of Psychology, 1835 Neil Avenue, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1222, office (614) 292-4193, fax (614) 688-3984, pitt.2@osu.edu, http://lpl.psy.ohio-state.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH P...

Patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia exhibit high rates of memory distortions in addition to their impairments in episodic memory. Several investigations have demonstrated that when healthy individuals (young and old) engaged in an encoding strategy that emphasized the uniqueness of study items (an item-specific encoding strategy), they were able to improve their discrimination between old items and unstudied critical lure items in a false memory task. In the present study we examined if patients with AD could also improve their memory discrimination when engaging in an item-specific encoding strategy. Healthy older adult controls, patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD, and patients with mild AD dementia were asked to study lists of categorized words. In the Item-Specific condition, participants were asked to provide a unique detail or personal experience with each study item. In the Relational condition, they were asked to determine how each item in the list was related to the others. To assess the influence of both strategies, recall and recognition memory tests were administered. Overall, both patient groups exhibited poorer memory in both recall and recognition tests compared to controls. In terms of recognition, healthy older controls and patients with MCI due to AD exhibited improved memory discrimination in the Item-Specific condition compared to the Relational condition, whereas patients with AD dementia did not. We speculate that patients with MCI due to AD use intact frontal networks to effectively engage in this strategy.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that presents predominantly with impairments in learning and memory. Patients with AD are also susceptible to false memories, a clinically relevant memory distortion where a patient remembers an incorrect memory that they believe to be true. The use of cognitive strategies to improve memory performance among patients with AD by reducing false memories has taken on added importance given the lack of disease-modifying agents for AD. However, existing evidence suggests that cognitive strategies to reduce false memories in patients with AD are of limited effectiveness, although these strategies may be useful at earlier stages of the disease. The purpose of this review is to examine experimental findings of false memories and associated memory processes in patients with mild cognitive impairment due to AD and mild AD dementia. Cognitive strategies to reduce false memories in these patient populations are also reviewed. Approaches to clinically relevant future research are suggested and discussed.