School of Psychology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Swanston Street, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2011 Dec;33(10):1069-78. doi: 10.1080/13803395.2011.596821. Epub 2011 Sep 19.
Impairment in visual paired associate learning occurs often in with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a condition considered to be an early stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD). To date, studies of aMCI have characterized impaired visual paired associate learning only in terms of summary scores such as total errors or total trials to criterion. The aim of this study was to determine the nature and magnitude of errors made on a continuous paired associate learning (CPAL) task designed to allow analysis of the component processes involved in paired associate learning. Twenty-one individuals with aMCI and 54 healthy age-matched older adults (HC) performed the CPAL task in which they had to learn six pattern-location pairings over six trials. Results suggested that aMCI patients performed significantly worse on the CPAL, both in learning rate and in error accumulation. Qualitative analyses of CPAL performance revealed that in aMCI there were significantly more errors on all indices except perseverative errors. When expressed as a percentage of total errors, abnormalities occurred only for within-search and exploratory errors. These findings suggest that poor performance on visual paired associate learning tasks in aMCI reflects impairments in both learning and executive function.
视觉对偶联合学习障碍在遗忘型轻度认知障碍（aMCI）中很常见，aMCI 被认为是阿尔茨海默病（AD）的早期阶段。迄今为止，对 aMCI 的研究仅从总错误或达到标准的总试验次数等综合得分方面描述了视觉对偶联合学习的损伤。本研究旨在确定设计用于分析涉及对偶联合学习的组成过程的连续对偶联合学习（CPAL）任务中所犯错误的性质和程度。21 名 aMCI 患者和 54 名健康年龄匹配的老年人（HC）进行了 CPAL 任务，他们必须在六个试验中学习六个模式-位置配对。结果表明，aMCI 患者在 CPAL 上的表现明显更差，无论是在学习速度还是错误积累方面。CPAL 表现的定性分析表明，除了坚持性错误外，所有指标的错误都明显更多。当表示为总错误的百分比时，只有在搜索内和探索性错误方面才会出现异常。这些发现表明，aMCI 患者在视觉对偶联合学习任务中的表现不佳反映了学习和执行功能的损伤。
