Affiliations: Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and Clinical Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA | Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA | Present address: Psychiatry Service (116A3), Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA, and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Note: [] Correspondence and reprints requests: H.J. Sagar, Department of Neurology, Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield S10 2JF, UK
Abstract: Autobiographical memories in young and elderly normal subjects are drawn mostly from the recent past but elderly subjects relate a second peak of memories from early adulthood. Memory for remote past public events is relatively preserved in dementia, possibly reflecting integrity of semantic relative to episodic memory. We examined recall of specific, consistent autobiographical episodes in Alzheimer's disease (AD) in response to cue words. Patients and control subjects drew most memories from the recent 20 years: episode age related to anterograde memory function but not subject age or dementia. Subjects also related a secondary peak of memories from early adulthood; episode age related to subject age and severity of dementia. The results suggest that preferential recall of memories from early adulthood is based on the salience of retrieval cues, altered by age and dementia, superimposed on a temporal gradient of semantic memory. Further, AD shows behavioural similarity to normal ageing.
