Veridical and false memories in healthy older adults and in dementia of the Alzheimer's type

Five groups of participants (young, healthy old, healthy old-old, very mild Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type, Mild Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type) s tudied and were tested on six 12-item lists of words selected from the DRM (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) materials. These lists of words s trongly converged semantically on a nonpresented critical word. The results indicated that both veridical recall and recognition performance decreased both as a function of age of the participants and as a function of dementi a severity. However, the recall and recognition of the highly related nonpr esented items actually increased as a function of age, and only slightly de creased as a function of DAT. When false memory was considered as a proport ion of veridical memory, there was a clear increase as a function of both a ge of the participants and as a function of disease severity. The results a re discussed in terms of (a) age and DAT-related changes in attention and m emory performance, and (b) the underlying mechanisms that produce false mem ories in the DRM paradigm.