Premium
The attribute priming effect in patients with Alzheimer's disease
Author(s) -
Perri Roberta,
Carlesimo Giovanni Augusto,
Monaco Marco,
Caltagirone Carlo,
Zannino Gian Daniele
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of neuropsychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.85
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1748-6653
pISSN - 1748-6645
DOI - 10.1111/jnp.12168
Subject(s) - optimal distinctiveness theory , psychology , correlation , priming (agriculture) , dominance (genetics) , cognitive psychology , social psychology , mathematics , chemistry , biology , biochemistry , botany , germination , geometry , gene
Experiments with semantic priming ( SP ) paradigms have documented early hypopriming in patients with AD when concepts are used as primes and attribute concept features as targets, suggesting that concept attributes are vulnerable to damage very early in the disease course. The aims of this study were to confirm early priming reduction in the attribute condition in patients with AD and to determine which of several semantic indexes (such as the level of distinctiveness, correlation or feature dominance of concept features) best predicts the priming effect size in AD . We administered an SP attribute condition paradigm to 20 mildly demented patients with AD and to 10 NC s. We used concept–attribute pairs for which normative data of semantic indexes relative to both concept primes (i.e., number, type, mean level of dominance, distinctiveness and correlation of features constituting the concepts) and target features (i.e., level of feature dominance, correlation and distinctiveness) were available. Results showed that compared to NC s, the AD group obtained very reduced priming facilitation. Furthermore, the item regression analyses showed that the priming decrement in the AD group was predicted by the feature dominance of the target in the related pairs; that is, the lower the target feature dominance, the lower the priming effect elicited. These results confirmed hypopriming in the attribute condition from the very early phase of AD and support the view that attributes which are more salient for the identification of a given concept are also those most resistant to semantic memory degradation in AD pathology.