True and False Memory Priming of Perceptual Closure Problems in Healthy Older Adults and Older Adults with Alzheimer’s Disease

Objectives The current study set out to investigate whether false memories for pictures exhibit priming effects in older adult controls (OACs) and people with early onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We conducted two studies to examine whether false memories for pictures had a priming effect on a perceptual closure task. Method In Experiment 1 older adult controls (OACs) and people with early onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were presented with pictorial versions of the Deese/Rodiger-McDermott (DRM) lists and took part in a recognition task. This followed with a perceptual closure task (PCT), where both groups were shown degraded pictures that became clearer overtime and participants had to identify the picture as quickly as possible. In Experiment 2 we manipulated the modality – verbal vs pictorial in both the study phase and PCT phase. Results Experiment 1 results indicated false memories for pictures did not serve as effective primes in the PCT. Experiment 2 results revealed, pictorial false memories primed the PCT significantly slower than pictorial true memories in the visual PCT task, but the reverse finding was shown for the verbal PCT task. Finally, verbal false memories primed the verbal PCT reliably faster than true memories. Conclusions Our findings show when solving pictorial problems, for both older adults and people with AD false memories may not activate the appropriate representation in memory for solving a pictorial problems whereas actually presented items do