Recognition by familiarity is preserved in Parkinson's without dementia and Lewy-Body disease.

Abstract

Objective:The retrieval deficit hypothesis states that the lack of deficit in recognition often observed in patients with Parkinson's disease is because of the low retrieval requirements of the task, given that these patients have retrieval and not encoding deficits. To test this hypothesis we investigated recognition memory by familiarity in Parkinson's patients and in patients with Lewy Bodies disease and Parkinson with dementia. Method: We analyzed to what extent the experimental groups were able to recognize by familiarity in a typical yes/no recognition memory task. The experimental groups were patients with early nondemented Parkinson's disease, advanced nondemented Parkinson's disease, demented Parkinson's patients, and patients with dementia with Lewy Bodies. We compared their performance with a group of young and another group of old healthy participants. The estimation of familiarity was made by analyzing recognition of word targets and distractors consisting of combinations of different letters in comparison with a condition in which targets and distractors were composed of similar letters, even though subjects were unaware of the independent variable. Results: The results indicate that familiarity was used at the same level by controls, patients with early Parkinson's disease and patients with dementia with Lewy Bodies. Although late Parkinson patients also used familiarity, its effect was only marginally significant. Patients with Parkinson's disease and dementia were not capable of using familiarity in recognition memory. Conclusions: Our results support the retrieval deficit hypothesis as Parkinson's patients without dementia show no deficit in a situation in which the retrieval requirements are minimal.

Exploring recollection and familiarity impairments in Parkinson’s disease

“…Some studies support the idea of a deficit in F but not in R (Davidson et al, 2006;Weiermann et al, 2010); others confirm the existence of a deficit in R (Edelstyn et al, 2007;Edelstyn et al, 2010;Hay et al, 2002); finally, the results of our previous study (Algarabel et al, 2010) demonstrated the ability of PD patients to use perceptual F. Considering the previous state of affairs, the aim of the present study was to determine whether PD patients show deficits in R but not in F when both are based on conceptual grounds (see, for example, Lanska, Olds, & Westerman, 2014). We estimated R directly by using an associative recognition paradigm that it is typically considered to involve only R when applied with the appropriate parameters (Wixted et al, 2010).…”

“…Results indicated that patients with early PD, advanced PD, and dementia with Lewy bodies used F to improve recognition to a similar extent as control groups. Unlike these groups, PD patients with dementia were not able to benefit from F (Algarabel et al, 2010). However, some of the groups that exhibited similar F scores had lower general recognition scores.…”

“…We extended our research on perceptual F (Algarabel et al, 2010) to the study of conceptual F in PD by using a modified two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) test. According to the rationale explained in this introduction and the results of our previous study (Algarabel et al, 2010), we expected to find deficits in R (associative recognition phase) and intact conceptual F (2AFC phase).…”

“…Because of this, we used a very specific paradigm (Parkin et al, 2001) in a previous study (Algarabel et al, 2010) to assess whether F and R processes are preserved in PD patients or not. In this paradigm, subjects study words composed of a restricted set of letters of the alphabet (a, e, u, r, n, d, b, g, z, j, x, k, w) that are mixed in the recognition test with other words composed of an alternative set of letters (o, i, c, t, s, l, p, m, v, f, h, q, ñ).…”

Evidence of an amnesia-like cued-recall memory impairment in nondementing idiopathic Parkinson's disease

“…These studies have usually found that recollection is impaired, but that familiarity is preserved in mild to moderate nondementing PD (Algarabel, et al, 2010;Edelstyn et al, 2007;Edelstyn et al, 2010;Hay, Moscovitch, & Levine, 2002;Rodr Iguez, Algarabel, & Escudero, 2014;Shepherd et al, 2013). However, familiarity has sometimes been found to be impaired as previously indicated (Davidson, et al, 2006;Weiermann, et al, 2010).…”