In two experiments we investigated whether older adult controls (OACs) and people with mild and moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) benefit from false memory priming effects in subsequent problem-solving tasks. In addition, and unlike in previous false memory priming studies with older adults, we examined latency measures in the recognition phase. In Experiment 1 participants were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been preceded by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists whose critical lures (CLs) were also the solutions to those problems. In Experiment 2, we used a similar paradigm but investigated whether CLs could prime solutions to subsequent analogical reasoning problems. In this latter experiment, we also examined whether these priming effects were stronger when the activation of the CL term occurred during the memory task (was presented as part of the list; i.e., true memories) or when these items were not presented but arose during encoding due to spreading activation (i.e., false memories). We found that all three groups' performance on these tasks was facilitated only by false memories spontaneously generated from the prior presentation of DRM lists. That is, performance on CRATs and analogical reasoning tasks was better (greater accuracy and faster speed) when those problems were preceded by DRM lists whose CLs also served as the solution to those problems. These findings are consistent with previous results from studies with children, young adults, and older adults and extends them to people with more moderate AD.

中文翻译：

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启动老年人和轻度至中度阿尔茨海默氏病患者，以错误的记忆解决问题。

在两个实验中，我们调查了在较后的问题解决任务中，老年人对照（OAC）和轻度和中度阿尔茨海默氏病（AD）患者是否受益于错误的记忆启动效应。此外，与以往针对老年人的虚假记忆启动研究不同，我们在识别阶段检查了潜伏期。在实验1中，要求参与者解决复合远程关联任务（CRAT）问题，其中一半是在Deese / Roediger-McDermott（DRM）列表之前提出的，这些列表的关键诱饵（CL）也是这些问题的解决方案。在实验2中，我们使用了类似的范例，但是研究了CL是否可以引发后续类比推理问题的解决方案。在后面的实验中，我们还研究了当在记忆任务中出现CL词的激活（作为列表的一部分；即真实的记忆）时，或者当由于扩展激活而在编码过程中没有出现这些项而出现时，这些启动效果是否更强（即错误的记忆）。我们发现，这三个小组在执行这些任务时的表现只有通过先前呈现DRM列表时自发产生的错误记忆才得以促进。也就是说，如果在DRM列表之前出现这些问题，则CRAT和类比推理任务的性能会更好（准确性更高，速度更快），而DRM列表的CL也可以解决这些问题。这些发现与先前对儿童，年轻人和老年人进行的研究结果一致，并将其扩展到患有中等AD的人群。