Priming older adults and people with Alzheimer’s disease analogical problem-solving with true and false memories

Abstract

We investigated the extent to which activation of specific information in associative networks during a memory task could facilitate subsequent analogical problem solving in healthy older adults as well as those with early onset Alzheimer's disease. We also examined whether these priming effects were stronger when the activation of the critical solution term during the memory task occurred when the item was actually presented (true memories) or when this item arose due to spreading activation to a related but nonpresented item (false memory). Older adult controls (OACs) and people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were asked to solve 9 verbal proportional analogies, 3 of which had been primed by Deese/Roediger-McDermott lists where the critical lure (and problem solution) was presented as a word in the list (true memory), 3 of which were primed by DRM lists whose critical lures were spontaneously activated during list presentation (false memory), and 3 of which were unprimed. As expected, OACs were better (both in terms of speed and accuracy) at solving problems than people with AD and both groups were better when false memories were primes than when true memories were primes or there were no primes. There were no reliable differences between unprimed and true prime problems. These findings demonstrate that (a) priming of problem solutions extends to verbal proportional analogies in OACs and people with AD, (b) false memories are more effective at priming problem solutions than true memories, and (c) there are clear positive consequences to the production of false memories.

True and false memory priming of perceptual closure problems in healthy older adults and older adults with Alzheimer’s disease.

“…Here, participants are shown degraded representations of pictures of objects or words and tried to identify them as quickly as possible. In other problem-solving tasks (i.e., CRATs and analogies), both older adults and people with Alzheimer’s disease benefit from having formed a false memory in a prior list-learning task when the false memory is also the solution to the problem (Akhtar et al, 2018; Akhtar & Howe, 2019; Howe & Akhtar, 2020). In fact, false memories tend to serve as better primes than true memories in these tasks (e.g., see Howe et al, 2013).…”

“…Previous research has shown that people with early onset AD exhibit the same rate of false memories as older adult controls (OACs) for verbal stimuli (Akhtar et al, 2018; Akhtar & Howe, 2019; Howe & Akhtar, 2020). However, other studies have shown the reverse effect, particularly with mild AD patients (e.g., Balota et al, 1999).…”

“…Traditionally, false memories have been seen as pejorative in nature, especially in the aging literature (e.g., Devitt & Schacter, 2016; Malone et al, 2019). However, recent research has shown older adults and people with mild and moderate AD have used false memories in a positive way (Akhtar et al, 2018; Akhtar & Howe, 2019; Howe & Akhtar, 2020). Specifically, false memories can be used to prime responses to insight-based problem-solving tasks using both a compound remote associative task (CRATs) and verbal proportional analogies (both tasks used frequently in intelligence tests, e.g., Sternberg & Rifkin, 1979).…”

“…They found that when participants falsely remembered the critical lures of the studied DRM lists, the corresponding CRATs were solved more frequently and faster than CRATs that had not been primed or in cases where DRM lists had been presented but critical lures were not falsely remembered. Akhtar and Howe (2019) and Howe and Akhtar (2020, Experiment 2), presented OACs and people with AD DRM lists whose critical lures served as primes for half the verbal proportional analogies that participants were later instructed to solve. Just like in Akhtar et al (2018), these studies showed that when participants falsely remembered the critical lures of the studied DRM lists, the corresponding analogical problems were solved more frequently and faster than the analogical problems that had not been primed or in cases where DRM lists had been presented but critical lures were not falsely remembered.…”

“…This same pattern of findings have been demonstrated in children and young adults (Howe et al, 2010;Howe et al, 2011;Howe et al, 2017). False memories, perhaps serve as better primes because according to the associative theories false memories are stronger than true memories because (1) they were activated more often as each list item is an associate of the CL whereas list items are only presented once and (2) they are self-generated (by the person viewing the list) whereas true memories are other-generated (by the experimenter) and we know that selfgenerated information is better remembered than other-generated (Akhtar et al, 2019). Otgaar et al (2015) used a similar paradigm, but instead of presenting CRAT or verbal analogical problems, they presented a perceptual closure task (PCT) to examine the effects of false memory priming.…”