Difference on Performance of Semantic Memory between the Normal Aging and Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease

• Main Authors: Hao-Ming Lee, 李浩銘
• Other Authors: Min-Sheng Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/27849030062742414107

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 工業工程與管理系 === 102 === The study is to investigate the differences between the normal aging and patients with Alzheimer’s disease on performance of semantic memory. To explore the difference on performance of semantic memory and recognition between normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease, this study takes cue and memory strategies into account. The first experiment is picture naming task. Participants have to answer the name of picture which is the stimulus in the picture. The study conduct this experiment to explore the category effect of Alzheimer’s disease and normal aging by living and non-living and whether the cue can help the search of semantic memory or not. The results show that the picture of the non-living will be better than the living one, and if there are some cues, the results will be better than the one without cues. Furthermore, the cues of situational picture which can prime the semantic memory of living picture are effective to help Alzheimer’s disease to retrieval. The second experiment is cue recognition test. Participants recognize the words which match up to the prime words from three options to explore the differences on performance between the Alzheimer’s disease and normal aging by different semantic hierarchy and the frequency of prime words. The results show that Alzheimer’s disease have the best accuracy and shortest time of recognition to attribute, but have the lowest accuracy and longest time of recognition to contiguity. Although, the prime words with different frequency have significant effect the performance of recognition for the elderly, but the Alzheimer's patients have no significant difference. These findings suggest that patients’ impairment on semantic tasks is the product of deficient retrieval in combination with a partially degraded semantic network.