Butters N, Granholm E, Salmon D P, Grant I, Wolfe J
Psychology Service, San Diego VA Medical Center, CA 92161.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 1987 Oct;9(5):479-97. doi: 10.1080/01688638708410764.
Episodic (recall of passages) and semantic (letter and category fluency) memory tasks were administered to Alzheimer's Disease (early stages), Huntington's Disease (HD), and alcoholic Korsakoff patients matched for overall severity of dementia. Although all three patient groups were severely (and equally) impaired on memory for passages, only the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients emitted numerous intrusion errors. On the fluency tasks, the performance of the mild Alzheimer patients was distinguishable from that of the other two patient groups. On both fluency tasks, the HD and Korsakoff patients demonstrated severe and moderate deficits, respectively, whereas the mild Alzheimer patients were impaired only on the category fluency task. As with the episodic memory test, the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients made more perseverative errors than did the HD patients on letter fluency. These findings suggest that Alzheimer and HD patients' impairments on episodic and semantic memory tasks reflect different underlying processes. The performance of Alzheimer patients is affected by their language dysfunction and an increased sensitivity to proactive interference; the deficits of the HD patients appear due to a general retrieval problem. Similarities in the error patterns (i.e., perseveration errors) of Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients are discussed with regard to recent neuropathological findings.
对患有早发性阿尔茨海默病、亨廷顿舞蹈症（HD）以及酒精所致柯萨科夫综合征的患者进行了情景记忆（回忆段落）和语义记忆（字母及类别流畅性）任务测试，这些患者在痴呆症总体严重程度上相匹配。尽管所有这三组患者在段落记忆方面均受到严重（且程度相同）损害，但只有阿尔茨海默病患者和柯萨科夫综合征患者出现了大量的侵入性错误。在流畅性任务中，轻度阿尔茨海默病患者的表现与其他两组患者不同。在两项流畅性任务中，HD患者和柯萨科夫综合征患者分别表现出严重和中度缺陷，而轻度阿尔茨海默病患者仅在类别流畅性任务中受损。与情景记忆测试一样，在字母流畅性任务中，阿尔茨海默病患者和柯萨科夫综合征患者比HD患者出现更多的持续性错误。这些发现表明，阿尔茨海默病患者和HD患者在情景记忆和语义记忆任务上的损害反映了不同的潜在过程。阿尔茨海默病患者的表现受其语言功能障碍以及对前摄干扰敏感性增加的影响；HD患者的缺陷似乎是由于一般的提取问题。结合最近的神经病理学发现，讨论了阿尔茨海默病患者和柯萨科夫综合征患者在错误模式（即持续性错误）上的相似之处。
