Functional Imaging During Recognition of Personally Familiar Faces and Places in Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients show better everyday functioning in a familiar setting, but they have a reduced ability to access con-textual details and episodes associated with a familiar person or environment. This suggests a dysfunction in the neural networks associated with stimulus identification. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural activity during the recognition of per-sonally familiar and unfamiliar faces and places among AD patients and elderly controls. We did not find a group difference in the neural activity within brain areas important for perceptual familiarity recognition. Patients showed reduced activation for familiar stimuli in pre-frontal brain areas known to be important for retrieving contextual information for a stimulus when compared with controls. These changes may contribute to how AD patients experience a personally familiar face or place