Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697-5100, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Oct;28(5):1484-1494. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01875-9. Epub 2021 Apr 8.
We use cognitive models to evaluate three theories of the change in semantic memory caused by Alzheimer's disease. We use data from 14,096 clinical assessments of 3602 Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers. Each patient completed a semantic memory task involving the odd-one-out comparison of animal names. Each patient was also independently evaluated to determine their level of impairment. Our cognitive models assume a feature-based representation of the animals and odd-one-out choice probabilities based on common-feature similarities. We find no evidence for the restructured representation hypothesis, which claims that impairment causes changes in the features used to represent stimuli. We also find no evidence for the attention change hypothesis, which claims that impairment causes greater attention to be given to concrete features at the expense of more abstract features. We do find evidence for the noisy access hypothesis, which claims that odd-one-out choices become less determined by semantic similarity and more prone to the simple response strategy of choosing the last option. We conclude that the noisy access hypothesis provides a simple account of odd-one-out choice behavior throughout the progression of Alzheimer's disease. More elaborate theories involving changes to underlying mental representations and attention processes need to provide evidence they are superior to the noisy access account.
我们使用认知模型来评估三种理论，即阿尔茨海默病导致语义记忆变化的理论。我们使用了来自 14096 名阿尔茨海默病患者及其护理人员的 3602 名患者的临床评估数据。每位患者都完成了一项语义记忆任务，涉及动物名称的异类比较。每位患者还进行了独立评估，以确定他们的损伤程度。我们的认知模型假设动物具有基于特征的表示，异类选择概率基于共同特征的相似性。我们没有发现证据支持重构表示假说，该假说声称损伤会导致用于表示刺激的特征发生变化。我们也没有发现证据支持注意力变化假说，该假说声称损伤会导致更多地关注具体特征，而牺牲更抽象的特征。我们确实发现了证据支持嘈杂访问假说，该假说声称异类选择不再由语义相似性决定，而是更容易受到选择最后一个选项的简单反应策略的影响。我们的结论是，嘈杂访问假说为阿尔茨海默病进展过程中的异类选择行为提供了一个简单的解释。更复杂的理论涉及到对潜在的心理表征和注意力过程的改变，需要提供证据证明它们优于嘈杂访问解释。
