Aurtenetxe Sara, García-Pacios Javier, Del Río David, López María E, Pineda-Pardo José A, Marcos Alberto, Delgado Losada Maria L, López-Frutos José M, Maestú Fernando
Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Center for Biomedical Technology of Madrid (CBT), Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Madrid, Spain.
Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Center for Biomedical Technology of Madrid (CBT), Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universidad Politécnica de MadridMadrid, Spain; Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Camilo Jose Cela UniversityMadrid, Spain.
Front Neurosci. 2016 Oct 13;10:443. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2016.00443. eCollection 2016.
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered a transitional stage between healthy aging and dementia, specifically Alzheimer's disease (AD). The most common cognitive impairment of MCI includes episodic memory loss and difficulties in working memory (WM). Interference can deplete WM, and an optimal WM performance requires an effective control of attentional resources between the memoranda and the incoming stimuli. Difficulties in handling interference lead to forgetting. However, the interplay between interference and WM in MCI is not well-understood and needs further investigation. The current study investigated the effect of interference during a WM task in 20 MCIs and 20 healthy elder volunteers. Participants performed a delayed match-to-sample paradigm which consisted in two interference conditions, distraction and interruption, and one control condition without any interference. Results evidenced a disproportionate impact of interference on the WM performance of MCIs, mainly in the presence of interruption. These findings demonstrate that interference, and more precisely interruption, is an important proxy for memory-related deficits in MCI. Thus, the current findings reveal novel evidence regarding the causes of WM forgetting in MCI patients, associated with difficulties in the mechanisms of attentional control.
轻度认知障碍（MCI）被认为是健康衰老与痴呆，特别是阿尔茨海默病（AD）之间的过渡阶段。MCI最常见的认知障碍包括情景记忆丧失和工作记忆（WM）困难。干扰会消耗WM，而最佳的WM表现需要有效控制记忆内容与传入刺激之间的注意力资源。处理干扰的困难会导致遗忘。然而，MCI中干扰与WM之间的相互作用尚未得到充分理解，需要进一步研究。本研究调查了干扰对20名MCI患者和20名健康老年志愿者在WM任务中的影响。参与者执行了一个延迟匹配样本范式，该范式包括两种干扰条件，即分心和中断，以及一种无任何干扰的对照条件。结果表明，干扰对MCI患者的WM表现有不成比例的影响，主要出现在存在中断的情况下。这些发现表明，干扰，更确切地说是中断，是MCI中与记忆相关缺陷的重要指标。因此，目前的研究结果揭示了关于MCI患者WM遗忘原因的新证据，这与注意力控制机制方面的困难有关。
