Selectively impaired associative learning in older people with cognitive decline

Abstract

Older people with declining cognitive function typically display deficits in declarative memory processes, often most evident on tests of associative learning (AL). The hippocampal formation (HF) is thought to be critically involved in the encoding and retrieval of such associations, consistent with neuroimaging findings that the HF is damaged in early stages of neurodegenerative disease and in older people with AL impairments. In the clinic, older people with cognitive decline commonly report difficulties associating names with faces. However, we have observed that such people are particularly impaired on tests requiring the association of novel stimuli. In Experiment 1, a series of AL task..