Marquie and Baracat (2000) found that older adults show poorer recognition discrimination than younger adults, but found no overall effect of sex or age upon response bias, except at the highest levels of education. Several studies have explored the impact of aging upon response bias in healthy older adults. Individuals with high rates of false recognition show an abnormally liberal bias understanding this liberal bias may be important in understanding false memories. Although perfect discrimination is always accompanied by a neutral bias, as discrimination decreases the range of possible biases increases. Response bias may be liberal (responding “old” greater than 50% of the time) or conservative (responding “old” less than 50% of the time) ( Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988 Macmillan & Creelman, 2005 Huh, Kramer, Gazzaley, & Delis, 2006). Another factor impacting memory is response bias, which is the overall tendency to respond “old” to test items. In the context of a recognition memory task, discrimination is expressed by the ability to distinguish items previously seen from those which were not seen during the prior study portion. Further understanding of the causes of false memories is necessary to aid in improving this condition.ĭiscrimination is one important factor in memory performance. By failing to consider hits and false alarms independently, important features of AD patients’ memory impairments may be obscured. However, this corrected score can oversimplify the interpretation of memory performance. Discrimination in recognition memory tests is often calculated by using a “corrected score” of hits minus false alarms. That patients with mild AD were able to successfully shift their response bias demonstrates that-despite their overall liberal response bias and poor memory relative to controls-one component of metamemorial ability is preserved in patients with mild AD.Īlzheimer’s disease (AD) causes progressive memory impairment leading to lesser than normal levels of true recognition and greater than normal levels of false recognition (for review see Budson, Wolk, Chong, & Waring, 2006). We found that both groups were able to shift their response bias between the two conditions. During one session participants were told that 30% of words were old, and at the other session that 70% were old. For each session, 30 words were studied and 60 words (half studied, half novel) were shown at test. Patients with mild AD and matched controls were evaluated with two almost identical paradigms, separated by about one week. This research attempted to determine whether it was possible to shift the response bias of mild AD patients to be more conservative on a recognition memory test through behavioral intervention.
This liberal response bias may result in mistaken beliefs about the completion of common tasks. Patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) display a greater tendency to endorse unstudied items as ‘old’ on memory tests than healthy older adults.
0 kommentar(er)
