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Getting the Hang of It: Preferential Gist Over Verbatim Story Recall and the Roles of Attentional Capacity and the Episodic Buffer in Alzheimer Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2010

Nancy S. Foldi
Nancy S. Foldi*
Affiliation:
Queens College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, Flushing, New York
*
Correspondence and reprint requests to: Nancy S. Foldi, Department of Psychology, Queens College, The City University of New York (CUNY), 65-30 Kissena Blvd, Science Building E318, Flushing, NY 11367. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Story recall in Alzheimer disease (AD) is typically used as a measure of episodic memory, but the degree to which recall is dependent on available attentional resources is not fully understood. The current study investigated how measures of attention were associated to verbatim recall (exact reproduction) or gist recall (relevant semantic meaning). Sixteen participants with AD and 16 age-matched healthy older adults recalled a story on immediate free recall and recognition. Controls recalled more units overall than AD. A group × response interaction revealed more gist than verbatim recall in AD, but those with mild disease generated approximately the same number gist responses as controls. For each group, qualitatively different attentional resources were associated with recall units. In controls, verbatim units correlated positively with primacy serial position items of the California Verbal Learning Test II (CVLTII), suggesting that episodic buffer resources may be associated with story recall. In AD, gist units were positively correlated with digits forward, but inversely related to the CVLTII primacy region items, suggesting reliance on low-level capacity resources. Possible explanations of the impaired performance in AD may be a bias in favor of gist processing, poor verbatim encoding, and/or processing failure at the level of the episodic buffer. (JINS, 2011, 17, 000–000)

Keywords

Alzheimer diseaseResource capacityEpisodic bufferAttentionLanguage processingDiscourseStory recall
Type
Research Articles
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 69 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The International Neuropsychological Society 2010

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