Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated that the memory disorders of patients with cortical (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) and subcortical (e.g., Huntington’s disease) dementias involve different processing deficits. For example, whereas patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) have unusual difficulty storing new information and are highly sensitive to proactive interference, patients with Huntington’s disease (HD) are deficient in the initiation of retrieval strategies for searching short- and long-term memory (Butters, Granholm, Salmon, Grant, & Wolfe, in press). Although it is often stated that the organization of semantic memory may be altered in both cortical and, to a lesser degree, subcortical dementias (e.g., Cummings & Benson, 1984), few investigators have attempted to elucidate and compare the exact nature of these changes. In the present chapter, we review some recent investigations that focus on this issue and demonstrate that the deterioration of semantic memory in DAT and HD is markedly different.
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Smith, S., Butters, N., Granholm, E. (1988). Activation of Semantic Relations in Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Disease. In: Whitaker, H.A. (eds) Neuropsychological Studies of Nonfocal Brain Damage. Springer Series in Neuropsychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8751-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8751-0_10
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