Using Mental Imagery to Improve Memory in Patients With Alzheimer Disease

Abstract

The present investigation worked to understand whether patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) could use general or self-referential mental imagery to improve their recognition of visually presented words. Experiment 1 showed that, unlike healthy controls, patients generally did not benefit from either type of imagery. To help determine whether the patients' inability to benefit from mental imagery at encoding was due to poor memory or due to an impairment in mental imagery, subjects then performed four imagery tasks, with varying imagery and cognitive demands. Experiment 2 showed that patients successfully performed basic visual imagery, but degraded semantic memory, coupled with visuospatial and executive functioning deficits, impaired their ability to perform more complex types of imagery. Given that patients with AD can perform basic mental imagery, our results suggest that episodic memory deficits likely prevent AD patients from storing or retrieving general mental images generated during encoding. Overall, the results of both experiments suggest that neurocognitive deficits do not allow patients with AD to perform complex mental imagery, which may be most beneficial to improving memory. However, our data also suggest that intact basic mental imagery and rehearsal could possibly be helpful if used in a rehabilitation multi-session intervention approach.

Improvement of encoding and retrieval in normal and pathological aging with word–picture paradigm

“…Among others, we believe that this line of research can be used in conjunction with other cognitive techniques based on the so-called picture superiority effect (Allyet al, 2009;Curran & Doyle, 2011) and cued recall PAL tasks (Boudreaux, Cherry, Elliott, & Hicks, 2011;Cherry et al, 2012), where the encoding and retrieval of information can be enhanced in healthy elderly people (Laeng, Øvervoll, & Ole Steinsvik, 2007) and people with mild dementia (Ally et al, 2008;Cabeza, Anderson, Locantore, & McIntosh, 2002) or AD (Hussey, Smolinsky, Piryatinsky, Budson, & Ally, 2011;Joubert et al, 2010). Addressing the importance of double encoding as regards the distinctiveness of pictures would require enlarging the sample used.…”

Scene construction impairments in Alzheimer's disease – A unique role for the posterior cingulate cortex

“…Accordingly, it will be important for future studies to explore the potential interplay between scene construction deficits and the prototypical impairments of autobiographical and spatial memory, seen in AD. The contribution of mental imagery to scene construction deficits in AD also warrants further study, given that patients with AD display significant difficulties on complex spatial mental imagery tasks, in the context of relatively preserved basic forms of mental imagery (Hussey et al, 2012). Similarly, we did not investigate the general narrative capacity of the AD cohort.…”

Using Pictures and Words To Understand Recognition Memory Deterioration in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease: A Review

“…Perhaps semantic network involvement signifies initial functional memory problems in the verbal domain that can be used as a marker of disease onset and progress. We propose that if a patient has forgotten conceptual information about a word [83], or degraded semantic networks prevent him or her from elaborately processing the meaning of a word [84], pictures can serve as this cue. Indeed, it has been hypothesized that pictures enhance semantic gist in patients and allow them to gain access more easily to the full meaning of words [85].…”

“…In contrast, when studying words, patients are generally left to conceptual processing with very limited perceptual information to help generate and monitor familiarity at test [28], which is compounded by the fact that patients with mild AD have difficulty using mental imagery to enhance verbal encoding [84]. The difference in how patients with aMCI utilize familiarity and post-retrieval monitoring for pictures versus words is worthy of continued investigation.…”