False Memory in Patients with Huntington's Disease
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Chen, I-Wen
Abstract
Literature shows that false recognition of new items that are related or unrelated to previously studied items arise from different underlying psychological mechanism and neuropathology respectively. Examining the amount of these two types of memory errors simultaneously can provide insights into whether the operation of gist memory, verbatim memory, and monitoring functioning is normal, and the functions of corresponding neural substrates (e.g., mesial temporal regions and frontal-related structures) operate adequately. The issue regarding elevated false alarm memory recognition errors in patients with Huntington’s disease (HD) has been widely reported. However, little has approached to HD patients’ pattern of false recognition for understanding their constructive processes of memory. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDemott (DRM) false memory paradigm, the present study was to explore gist memory, verbatim memory, and monitoring functioning in patients with HD, and to investigate the functioning of corresponding neural substrates based on the preceding results. Meanwhile, this study made an attempt to document neurocognitive functions in our Taiwan patients with HD. Twenty-five HD patients and thirty healthy normal controls participated in the study, and HD patients were further partitioned into mild and moderate to severe groups based on their general cognitive and living functioning (thirteen mild HD patients and twelve moderate to severe HD patients). All subjects were given a battery of neuropsychological tests and the DRM paradigm tasks. The results revealed that both mild and moderate to severe HD patients evidenced significant deficits of executive function, episodic memory, language function, visuoperceptual function, and psychomotor speed. HD patients’ performances on the DRM paradigm tasks were as follows: (1) On the related false recognition indices, only moderate to severe HD patients exhibited poor score compared with normal controls on the verbal DRM task while performance of both HD patient groups was compatible with that of normal controls on the pictorial DRM task. (2) On the unrelated false recognition indices, mild HD patients showed significantly more error scores only on the verbal DRM task compared with normal controls, whereas moderate to severe HD patients exhibited more error scores on both the verbal and pictorial DRM tasks compared with normal controls. (3) On the verbatim memory indices, both HD patient groups showed significantly poorer performances than the normal controls only on the pictorial DRM task; moreover, moderate to severe HD patients’ performances were even poorer than mild HD patients. Based on these results, it appears that defective verbatim memory and monitoring functioning are early signs in HD patients and may deteriorate across the stages of the disease. However, gist memory is a relative robust functioning and only partially decline at the advanced stages of HD. These findings might further reflect that the functioning of the mesial temporal regions seems to be preserved compared with that of the frontal-related structures in early HD patients. We thus suggest developing cognitive rehabilitation programs based on relatively normal gist functioning for patients with early HD.
Subjects
false alarm
verbatim memory
gist memory
monitoring
Type
thesis
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