Waring J D, Dimsdale-Zucker H R, Flannery S, Budson A E, Kensinger E A
Dept. of Psychology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA; Dept. of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA.
Dept. of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA; Dept. of Psychology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2017 Feb;96:240-248. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.01.011. Epub 2017 Jan 13.
Young and older adults experience benefits in attention and memory for emotional compared to neutral information, but this memory benefit is greatly diminished in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Little is known about whether this impairment arises early or late in the time course between healthy aging and AD. This study compared memory for positive, negative, and neutral items with neutral backgrounds between patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy older adults. We also used a divided attention condition in older adults as a possible model for the deficits observed in MCI patients. Results showed a similar pattern of selective memory for emotional items while forgetting their backgrounds in older adults and MCI patients, but MCI patients had poorer memory overall. Dividing attention during encoding disproportionately reduced memory for backgrounds (versus items) relative to a full attention condition. Participants performing in the lower half on the divided attention task qualitatively and quantitatively mirrored the results in MCI patients. Exploratory analyses comparing lower- and higher-performing MCI patients showed that only higher-performing MCI patients had the characteristic scene memory pattern observed in healthy older adults. Together, these results suggest that the effects of emotion on memory are relatively well preserved for patients with MCI, although emotional memory patterns may start to be altered once memory deficits become more pronounced.
与中性信息相比，年轻人和老年人在对情感信息的注意力和记忆力方面都有优势，但这种记忆优势在阿尔茨海默病（AD）中会大大减弱。对于这种损伤是在健康衰老到AD的病程早期还是晚期出现，人们知之甚少。本研究比较了轻度认知障碍（MCI）患者和健康老年人对带有中性背景的积极、消极和中性项目的记忆。我们还在老年人中使用了分心条件，作为MCI患者中观察到的缺陷的一种可能模型。结果显示，老年人和MCI患者在对情感项目的选择性记忆上有相似的模式，同时会忘记它们的背景，但MCI患者总体记忆力较差。与全神贯注条件相比，编码过程中分心会不成比例地降低对背景（相对于项目）的记忆。在分心任务中表现处于下半部分的参与者在质量和数量上反映了MCI患者的结果。比较表现较差和较好的MCI患者的探索性分析表明，只有表现较好的MCI患者具有在健康老年人中观察到的特征性场景记忆模式。总之，这些结果表明，情感对记忆的影响在MCI患者中相对保留得较好，尽管一旦记忆缺陷变得更加明显，情感记忆模式可能开始改变。
