Concrete imagery and suffix effects in immediate memory: Changes with age and Alzheimer's disease.
Item
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Title
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Concrete imagery and suffix effects in immediate memory: Changes with age and Alzheimer's disease.
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Identifier
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AAI9325126
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identifier
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9325126
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Creator
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Mackell, Joan Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Susan Karp Manning
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Experimental | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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The concreteness effect, superior recall of concrete compared to abstract words, was examined in normal young and elderly subjects and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), with auditory presentation of both concrete and abstract nouns in two experiments: Serial recall and free recall. Recall in the control conditions was compared to the suffix conditions in which a not-to-be-recalled word was appended onto the end of the sequence. All subjects participated in a delayed recall task, and a subset of elderly and AD subjects participated in a delayed recognition task.;Immediate recall showed the expected small but significant decline in performance with age, and a substantial and significant performance decrement with AD. As expected, free recall performance was significantly better for all groups compared to strict serial recall, and the suffix caused increasing interference in recall with age and AD. An analysis of intrusions, however, clearly differentiated the AD group from the normal groups, since the normal subjects virtually never intruded the suffix as a response in recall while the AD subjects frequently did, in spite of repeated instructions to disregard it. Other extra-list intrusion errors also suggested a severe deficit in response inhibition for the AD group.;The main effect on concreteness was not significant in strict serial recall using a strict scoring method, although it was significant and approximately equivalent in free recall for all groups. In the delayed recall condition, the number of words recalled declined significantly with age and markedly with AD, supporting evidence of a very rapid rate of forgetting in AD subjects. However, although the young and elderly subjects showed a significant and basically equivalent concreteness effect, the most striking finding was that the AD subjects virtually never recalled an abstract word in this delayed condition.;Delayed recognition for a subgroup of elderly and AD subjects also showed a significant concreteness effect for both groups, with diminished recognition performance for AD subjects. Hits and false alarms as measures of a subject's metamemory for performance accuracy, indicated significantly less sensitivity and more false alarms for the AD group.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
