# DECOMPOSITION OF MEMORY FAILURE IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

> **NIH NIH R01** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 1993 · $210,920

## Abstract

Often the first and most debilitating symptom in Alzheimer's disease (AD)
is difficulty in learning and retaining new information.  AD patients are
impaired on all tests of explicit memory (e.g., recall and recognition of
events, facts, and, in the laboratory, study-fist materials).  The memory
failure is thought to reflect the combined effects of damage to limbic
and to neocortical neural systems, but it has been difficult to know
which specific aspects of AD memory failure are due to the limbic versus
the neocortical lesions.  The overall goal of the present proposal is to
decompose the memory failure of AD into limbic versus neocortical memory
system dysfunctions through two logical analyses.  First, we plan to
compare the performance of AD patients with that of patients with pure
global amnesia (GA).  The two groups are similar in that they both have
limbic system damage, but dissimilar in that the GA patients have little
or no neocortical damage.  By this logic, differences in explicit memory
failures between AD and GA patients may be attributed to the neocortical
damage in AD.  We also propose to study implicit memory, which is intact
in GA and thought to reflect neocortical memory systems.  AD patients are
impaired on some measures of implicit memory but intact on others.
Comparison of AD and GA patients on implicit memory tests ought to
suggest which neocortical memory systems are functionally spared and
which are compromised in early AD.  Second, we propose to use a
within-task logic of dissociation that has seldom been applied to the
study of memory failure in AD.  The within-task logic, in contrast to the
more often used between-task logic, ought to reveal the functional
natures of spared and compromised memory systems in AD.  In a
multi-institutional collaboration, we propose 9 experiments with 120
early-stage AD patients, 20 CA patients, and 140 control subjects that
test 5 hypotheses: (1) AD patients are impaired on both
recollection-based and familiarity-based components of explicit memory;
(2) GA patients are impaired on the recollection-based component of
explicit memory but they are intact on the familiarity-based component of
explicit memory; (3) AD and GA patients base a disproportionate amount of
explicit recognition memory judgment on partially (AD) or fully (GA)
preserved familiarity in the near absence of recollection; (4) AD
patients have a specific deficit in conceptual implicit memory processes,
with perceptual implicit memory processes remaining intact; and (5) AD
patients have a specific deficit in retrieval-demanding tests of implicit
memory, with identification-demanding tests of implicit memory remaining
intact.  The development of neural-system specific memory tests ought to
be of particular value in the construction of biologically valid measures
of cognition for studies examining putative treatments for AD and for
other neurological diseases that affect learning as well as more benign
processes, such as healthy ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 3123102
- **Project number:** 1R01AG011121-01
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **SAM.gov UEI:** HJD6G4D6TJY5
- **Principal Investigator:** JOHN GABRIELI
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1993
- **Award amount:** $210,920
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 1993-05-01 → 1996-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/3123102

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 3123102, DECOMPOSITION OF MEMORY FAILURE IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE (1R01AG011121-01). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/3123102. Licensed CC0.

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