Deterioration of the memory for historic events in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's disease

▶ Newly developed Historic Events Test (HET) demands knowledge about public events of the past 60 years. ▶ Performance of patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease was impaired in the HET. ▶ Memory performance of all time segments was uniformly affected by this kind of retrograde amnesia. ▶ In the same patients a temporal gradient for autobiographical memory was previously found. ▶ Retrieval frequency might be crucial for the independence of a memory from the hippocampus.