Ballesteros Soledad, Reales José Manuel
Departamento de Psicología Básica II, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Juan del Rosal 10, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
Neuropsychologia. 2004;42(8):1063-70. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.12.008.
This study is the first to report complete priming in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and older control subjects for objects presented haptically. To investigate possible dissociations between implicit and explicit objects representations, young adults, Alzheimer's patients, and older controls performed a speeded object naming task followed by a recognition task. Similar haptic priming was exhibited by the three groups, although young adults responded faster than the two older groups. Furthermore, there was no difference in performance between the two healthy groups. On the other hand, younger and older healthy adults did not differ on explicit recognition while, as expected, AD patients were highly impaired. The double dissociation suggests that different memory systems mediate both types of memory tasks. The preservation of intact haptic priming in AD provides strong support to the idea that object implicit memory is mediated by a memory system that is different from the medial-temporal diencephalic system underlying explicit memory, which is impaired early in AD. Recent imaging and behavioral studies suggest that the implicit memory system may depend on extrastriate areas of the occipital cortex although somatosensory cortical mechanisms may also be involved.
本研究首次报告了阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者及老年对照受试者对通过触觉呈现的物体存在完全启动效应。为了探究内隐和外显物体表征之间可能存在的分离情况，年轻成年人、AD患者及老年对照者完成了一项快速物体命名任务，随后进行了一项识别任务。三组均表现出相似的触觉启动效应，不过年轻成年人的反应速度比另外两组老年人更快。此外，两个健康组在任务表现上没有差异。另一方面，年轻和老年健康成年人在外显识别方面没有差异，而正如预期的那样，AD患者存在严重受损。这种双重分离表明不同的记忆系统介导了这两种类型的记忆任务。AD患者中完整触觉启动效应的保留有力支持了这样一种观点，即物体内隐记忆由一个不同于外显记忆所依赖的内侧颞叶间脑系统的记忆系统介导，而外显记忆系统在AD早期就会受损。近期的影像学和行为学研究表明，内隐记忆系统可能依赖于枕叶皮质的纹外区域，尽管体感皮质机制可能也参与其中。
