Alzheimer’s disease and feeling-of-knowing in episodic memory

Episodic memory feeling-of-knowing (FOK) was examined in 16 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), 16 elderly participants, and 16 younger adults. Participants were given cued recall and recognition tests of 20 critical cue-target words. Subsequently, they judged their FOK for non-recalled words in terms of how likely they thought they would be to recognize the keywords on a subsequent recognition test. The results indicated dementia-related deficits on both the recall and recognition tests. Compared to older adults, AD patients exhibited impaired FOK accuracy. This pattern of outcome indicates that early AD is associated with a deficit in episodic memory and a deficit in memory monitoring for newly learned information. Furthermore, our observation revealed that in AD, episodic memory may be a more important factor than executive function in explaining the FOK inaccuracy.