Memory for Choices in Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Despite their cognitive impairment, patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) often make important life choices. When making choices, people frequently attempt to directly compare the features of different options, rather than evaluating each option separately. Not every feature has an analogous (or alignable) feature in the other option, however. In 2005, Mather’s group found that both younger and older adults filled in such gaps when remembering, creating features in the other option to contrast with existing features. In the present study, such effects of alignability on recognition memory were not found in patients with mild AD. This finding suggests that patients with mild AD are less likely to engage in feature-by-feature comparison processes across choice options, a change that may lead them to make qualitatively different choices than healthy older adults.

Choice-Supportive Misremembering: A New Taxonomy and Review

“…The effects of alignability on decision making or memory have been investigated in a number of studies (e.g., Markman and Medin, 1995 ; Markman and Gentner, 1997 ; Mather et al, 2005 ), and the degree of alignability varies across the studies we reviewed. All attributes of the options in Svenson et al (2009) , Queen and Hess (2010) and DeKay et al (2014) were alignable, whereas others employed a design where half of the attributes were alignable and the other half unalignable ( Budson et al, 2006 ; Hess et al, 2012 ). The remaining studies did not specifically assess the importance of alignability and did not specify the alignability of the attributes.…”

“…Generally, they observed greater choice-supportiveness for alignable attributes. This suggests that the effect can be greater for alignable features, at least in some populations (see also Mather et al, 2005 ; Budson et al, 2006 ), and that this difference can be related to cognitive skills. However, more studies are needed to fully clarify the role of alignability in choice-supportive misremembering, especially in relation to the category of false memories and in different populations.…”

“…However, some used a design with different delay levels in the same study ( Mather and Johnson, 2000 ; Chen and Zhang, 2003 ), showing how delay affected the particular type of memory distortion studied. The other experiments all used rather short but variable time lags ( Budson et al, 2006 ; DeKay et al, 2014 ).…”

Comparing different types of source memory attributes in dementia of Alzheimer's type

“…spatial information), while sparing source-specifying features that are more automatically processed. In fact, older adults with AD have increased difficulties in tasks that reflect frontal functioning and therefore should be particularly affected in SM tasks that strongly rely on control processes (Budson et al, 2006).…”