Behavioral data from demented patients and scopolamine-impaired normal subjects, and morphological data from patients with Alzheimer''s disease (AD) suggest that intrusion errors may mirror the dysfunction of the cholinergic system. The Picture Recall and Recognition Task used in this study was designed to systematically measure intrusion errors (i.e. false recognition of items semantically related to target items), and false alarms (i.e. false recognition of items semantically unrelated to target items). The results taken from the baseline data of a clinical trial with geriatric patients with major depressive episode and varying degrees of cognitive impairment indicate that intrusion errors occur more often than false alarms in those patients with more severe cognitive decline. Because this pattern was only observed in patients with dementia of nonvascular origin, the results support the hypothesis that intrusion errors are a relatively specific indicator of the cholinergic deficit accompanying AD.

Keywords:
Alzheimer's disease, Intrusion errors, Cholinergic system, Vascular dementia, Memory
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© 1990 S. Karger AG, Basel
1991
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