Abstract
The first and most prominent clinical manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is memory loss. Previously it was believed that memory loss occurred “across the board”, that is, all types of memory (i.e., verbal, visual, spatial memory, etc.) were severely impaired. The primary purpose for this study is to provide an answer to a relatively simple question, namely, can the recall of AD patients be facilitated on a motor memory task by changing the distance and/or direction of the last of a series of movements, thereby producing the “release from proactive inhibition effect (RPI)”. It would be expected that proactive inhibition would build up as the subject’s memory of a recent movement is interfered with by his memory of previous movements. However, if there is a noticeable change in the character of a final movement, the reproduction accuracy would be improved. The superior reproduction accuracy of an altered movement (termed manipulated) over a non-altered movement (termed control) after a repeated movement series (termed constrained) has been called the “release from proactive inhibition effect” and appears to be a highly reliable finding occurring not only in the motor memory of young adults (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), but also in that of children as young as age five and the mentally retarded (Kelso et al., 1979). Given the beneficial effect that RPI has on retention in these different populations, might this same process provide a useful method for enhancement of memory with AD patients? As a review of the literature can find no comparable study performed with this patient group, the goal of the study was simply to demonstrate either the presence or absence of the RPI effect in AD patients. While the outcome of this experiment would provide further evidence as to the generality of the RPI effect, it would also address the more important question of whether or not manipulations designed to improve encoding in AD patients can have a facilitory effect on memory.
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Harris, J. et al. (1998). Verbal and Motor Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease: Release from Proactive Inhibition. In: Fisher, A., Hanin, I., Yoshida, M. (eds) Progress in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases. Advances in Behavioral Biology, vol 49. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5337-3_43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5337-3_43
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