Department of Psychology, Abo Akademi University, FIN-20500 Abo, Finland.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Mar;48(4):1079-88. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.12.008. Epub 2009 Dec 16.
We studied how subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and age-matched controls learned and maintained the names of unfamiliar objects that were trained with or without semantic support (object definitions). Naming performance, phonological cueing, incidental learning of the definitions and recognition of the objects were tested during follow-up. We found that word learning was significantly impaired in MCI and AD patients, whereas forgetting patterns were similar across groups. Semantic support showed a beneficial effect on object name retrieval in the MCI group 8 weeks after training, suggesting that the MCI patients' preserved semantic memory can compensate for impaired episodic memory. The MCI group performed equally well as the controls in the tasks measuring incidental learning and recognition memory, whereas the AD group showed impairment in this respect. Both the MCI and the AD group benefited less from phonological cueing than the controls. Our findings indicate that word learning is compromised in both MCI and AD, whereas long-term retention of newly learned words is not affected to the same extent. Incidental learning and recognition memory seem to be well preserved in MCI.
我们研究了轻度认知障碍（MCI）、早期阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者和年龄匹配的对照组如何学习和记住陌生物体的名称，这些物体是在有或没有语义支持（物体定义）的情况下进行训练的。在随访期间测试了命名表现、语音提示、定义的偶然学习和物体的识别。我们发现，MCI 和 AD 患者的单词学习明显受损，而遗忘模式在各组之间相似。语义支持在训练 8 周后对 MCI 组的物体名称检索有有益影响，表明 MCI 患者保存的语义记忆可以弥补受损的情景记忆。MCI 组在衡量偶然学习和识别记忆的任务中表现与对照组相当，而 AD 组在这方面表现出障碍。MCI 组和 AD 组从语音提示中获益均少于对照组。我们的发现表明，MCI 和 AD 患者的单词学习都受到损害，而新学单词的长期保留则没有受到同样程度的影响。偶然学习和识别记忆在 MCI 中似乎保存得很好。
