El Haj Mohamad, Moustafa Ahmed A, Antoine Pascal, Chapelet Guillaume
Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France.
CHU Nantes, Clinical Gerontology Department, Bd Jacques Monod, Nantes, France.
J Alzheimers Dis Rep. 2024 Jan 12;8(1):33-42. doi: 10.3233/ADR-230144. eCollection 2024.
Future thinking and prospective memory are two cognitive processes oriented toward the future and reliant on the ability to envision oneself in future scenarios.
We explored the connection between future thinking and prospective memory in individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD).
We invited both AD participants and control participants to engage in event-based prospective memory tasks (e.g., "please hand me this stopwatch when I inform you there are 10 minutes remaining") and time-based prospective memory tasks (e.g., "close the book you are working on in five minutes"). Additionally, we asked participants to engage in a future thinking task where they imagined upcoming events.
Analysis revealed that AD participants exhibited lower performance in both prospective memory tasks and future thinking compared to the control group. Importantly, we identified significant positive correlations between the performance on event- and time-based prospective memory tasks and future thinking abilities among AD participants.
These findings underscore the connection between the decline in both prospective memory domains and the ability to envision future events in individuals with AD. Our results also shed light on the challenges AD individuals face when trying to project themselves into the future to mentally pre-experience upcoming events.
前瞻性思维和前瞻记忆是两种面向未来的认知过程，依赖于在未来情景中设想自身的能力。
我们探究了阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者前瞻性思维与前瞻记忆之间的联系。
我们邀请了AD患者和对照参与者参与基于事件的前瞻记忆任务（例如，“当我告知你还剩10分钟时，请把这个秒表递给我”）和基于时间的前瞻记忆任务（例如，“五分钟后合上你正在看的书”）。此外，我们要求参与者参与一项前瞻性思维任务，即想象即将发生的事件。
分析显示，与对照组相比，AD患者在前瞻记忆任务和前瞻性思维方面的表现均较差。重要的是，我们发现AD患者中基于事件和基于时间的前瞻记忆任务表现与前瞻性思维能力之间存在显著正相关。
这些发现强调了AD患者前瞻记忆领域的衰退与设想未来事件能力之间的联系。我们的结果还揭示了AD患者在试图将自己投射到未来以在心理上预先体验即将发生的事件时所面临的挑战。
