The range of memory impairments associated with Alzheimer's disease(AD) has been a focus for psychological and clinical researchers for many years.In addition to investigations of AD patients' veridical memory using traditional recognition memory tasks,a number of recent studies have focused on false memories to reveal the underlying causes of memory impairment in AD.Studies comparing illusory memories between AD patients and healthy older people have revealed various differences in memory deficits between the development of AD and the typical aging processes.Here,we review 3 types of memory illusions tested in AD patients:associative memory illusions,fluency-based false memories and source memory errors.By comparing AD patients with healthy older adults,we sought to analyze the mechanisms underlying AD-related memory impairments at different stages of memory processing,including encoding,retrieval and monitoring.This comparison revealed that AD patients exhibit an impaired ability to establish and utilize gist representations at the encoding stage and impairments in processing on the basis of familiarity and recollection at the retrieval stage.Consequently,patients with AD have access to less information when making memory judgments.As a result,they become more susceptible to the effects of item fluency,which can be manipulated during the retrieval stage.Furthermore,with impaired source memory monitoring abilities,the capacity of AD patients to suppress memory illusions is compromised.Based on these findings,we propose that the study of false memories constitute a critical tool for elucidating the memory impairments involved in AD.Further explorations of these memory impairments will have practical significance for the diagnosis and treatment of AD in the future.
We investigated the psychological mechanism of survival processing advantage from the perspective of false memory in two experiments.Using a DRM paradigm in combination with analysis based on signal detection theory,we were able to separately examine participants’utilization of verbatim representation and gist representation.Specifically,in Experiment 1,participants rated semantically related words in a survival scenario for a survival condition but rated pleasantness of words in the same DRM lists for a non-survival control condition.The results showed that participants demonstrated more gist processing in the survival condition than in the pleasantness condition;however,the degree of item-specific processing in the two encoding conditions did not significantly differ.In Experiment 2,the control task was changed to a category rating task,in which participants were asked to make category ratings of words in the category lists.We found that the survival condition involved more item-specific processing than did the category condition,but we found no significant difference between the two encoding conditions at the level of gist processing.Overall,our study demonstrates that survival processing can simultaneously promote gist and item-specific representations.When the control tasks only promoted either item-specific representation or gist representation,memory advantages of survival processing occurred.
The reconstructive process in memory may cause distortions or errors.Associative memory illusion is one of the most common types of false memories.It acts as a reflection of the adaptive characteristic of memory by suggesting its ability to adaptively use semantic gist information even with limited cognitive resources.Meanwhile, the adaptive characteristic of memory is also manifested by inhibiting false memories with certain strategies (e.g., encoding item-specific information) to ensure memory accuracy according to the demands of specific situations.This article looks into the life-span developmental features of the adaptive characteristic of memory by summarizing the age features of two types of abilities: employing gist representation and inhibiting associative memory illusion.In the future, further efforts in this field are proposed to explore the specific adaptive nature of memory from the perspective of evolution.
