Background: Alzheimer's disease is characterized by macrolinguistic changes. This decline is often analyzed with quantitative scales. Aims: To analyze discourse production in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to identify qualitative markers of macrolinguistic decline. Methods & Procedures: We analyzed macrolinguistic features of a clinical…

This article reflects upon the development of Connections, a service-learning collaboration between a Research I university and an urban art museum that trains students to work with patient groups from the community using Visual Thinking Strategies. This method of art exploration helps people with Alzheimer's disease express memories and relieve…

Studies have shown that the "Four Seasons" music may enhance the autobiographical performance of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. We used a repeated measures design in which autobiographical recall of 12 mild AD patients was assessed using a free narrative method under three conditions: (a) in "Silence," (b) after being exposed to the opus "Four…

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,…

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…

Category-specific deficits have rarely been reported in semantic dementia (SD). To our knowledge, only four previous studies have documented category-specific deficits, and these have focused on the living versus non-living things contrast rather than on more fine-grained semantic categories. This study aimed to determine whether a…

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…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) accomplish voluntary reductions in speech rate. A group of talkers with no history of neurological disease was included for comparison. This study was motivated by the idea that knowledge of how speakers with dysarthria…

In general, declarative learning is associated with the activation of the medial temporal lobes (MTL), while the basal ganglia (BG) are considered the substrate for procedural learning. More recently it has been demonstrated the distinction of these systems may not be as absolute as previously thought and that not only the explicit or implicit…

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…

The present study examined language production skills in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. A unique cued sentence generation task was created in order to reduce demands on memory and attention. Differences in sentence production abilities according to disease severity and cognitive impairments were assessed. Language samples were obtained from 20…

Whilst patients with semantic dementia (SD) are known to suffer from semantic memory and language impairments, there is less agreement about whether memory for personal everyday experiences, autobiographical memory, is compromised. In healthy individuals, functional MRI (fMRI) has helped to delineate a consistent and distributed brain network…

Recent research has demonstrated that Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects the visual sensory pathways, producing a variety of visual deficits, including the capacity to perceive structure-from-motion (SFM). Because the sensory areas of the adult brain are known to retain a large degree of plasticity, the present study was conducted to explore whether…

Previous literature suggests that Parkinson's disease is marked by deficits in timed behaviour. However, the majority of studies of central timing mechanisms in patients with Parkinson's disease have used timing tasks with a motor component. Since the motor abnormalities are a defining feature of the condition, the status of timing in Parkinson's…

Arithmetic skills are generally claimed to be preserved in semantic dementia (SD), suggesting functional independence of arithmetic knowledge from other aspects of semantic memory. However, in a recent case series analysis we showed that arithmetic performance in SD is not entirely normal. The finding of a direct association between severity of…