This case study describes an art therapy intervention with a client diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who was coping with grief. The course of fifteen sessions included three phases: body awareness, grief emotions, and grief acceptance. The positive changes parallel ways that art therapy can benefit older adults by promoting communication,…

Purpose: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and the amnestic variant of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are neurodegenerative conditions characterized by a profound loss of functional communication abilities. Communicative impairment in AD and PPA is especially apparent in the domain of naming common objects and familiar faces. We evaluated the…

Research has shown that animal-assisted activities have specific benefits for older adults, such as decreasing loneliness (Banks & Banks, 2002; Banks, Willoughby, & Banks, 2008; Calvert, 1989) and depression (Grubbs, Artese, Schmitt, Cormier, & Panton, 2016; Le Roux & Kemp, 2009; Moretti et al., 2010) while increasing positive…

Most tasks test memory within the same day, however, most forgetting occurs after 24 h. Further, testing memory for simple words or objects does not mimic real-world memory experiences. We designed a memory task showing participants video clips of everyday kinds of experiences, including positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, and tested memory…

This eight-week action research project examined how art can be a possible intervention to memory loss. Five octogenarians with dementia participated in a qualitative phenomenological case study exploring the connections between memory and making art. Various methods of data collection were employed, including survey, interview, artifacts,…

Source monitoring is the process of making judgments about the origin of memories. There are three categories of source monitoring: reality monitoring (discrimination between self- versus other-generated sources), external monitoring (discrimination between several external sources), and internal monitoring (discrimination between two types of…

Advances in dual-retrieval models of recall make it possible to use clinical data to test theoretical hypotheses about mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's dementia (AD), the most common forms of neurocognitive impairment. Hypotheses about the nature of the episodic memory declines in these diseases, about decline versus sparing of…

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) is a progressive, degenerative disease that occurs in the cerebral cortex due to increased levels of glutamate, the proliferation of plaque-forming amyloid beta proteins, and reactive gliosis. Establishing behavioral indicators of the disease (e.g., impairments of episodic memory) and use of neuroimaging technology…

It is tentatively estimated that 25% of people with early Alzheimer's disease (AD) show impaired awareness of disease-related changes in their own cognition. Research examining both normative self-awareness and altered awareness resulting from brain disease or injury points to the central role of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in generating…

Most neuropsychological assessments of episodic memory bear little similarity to the events that patients actually experience as memories in daily life. The first aim of this study was to use a virtual environment to characterize episodic memory profiles in an ecological fashion, which includes memory for central and perceptual details,…

The aim of this article was to review the evidence of errorless learning on learning outcomes in patients with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. A computer-aided literature search from 1999 to 2011 was carried out using MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PsycINFO and PsycArticles. Keywords included…

Impairment on standard tests of delayed recall is often already maximal in the aMCI stage of Alzheimer's Disease. Neuropathological work shows that the neural substrates of memory function continue to deteriorate throughout the progression of the disease, hinting that further changes in memory performance could be tracked by a more sensitive test…

The hippocampus is the primary site of memory and learning in the brain. Both normal aging and various disease pathologies (e.g., alcoholism, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder) are associated with lower hippocampal volumes in humans and hippocampal atrophy predicts progression of Alzheimers disease. In animals, there is convincing…

This study presents a new way of mediation between staff and elderly persons with intellectual disability (ID) and Alzheimer type dementia (AD), i.e., the MISC (Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (Klein, 1988, 2003) model. The MISC was adopted for interactions between staff and adults with ID and AD based on observations of…

This study evaluated the Memory Bridge Initiative (MBI), an educational, experiential program pairing high school students with older adults who have dementia. A qualitative, single group design with baseline and follow-up measures examined whether or not students would have a positive learning experience while gaining newfound appreciation and…