DEFICITS IN FAMILIARITY AND WRONG RECOGNITION AS MARKERS OF COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT: EXPERIMENTAL AND LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS IN HEALTHY ELDERS, MCI AND ALZHEIMER PATIENTS

Name of the Project

DEFICITS IN FAMILIARITY AND WRONG RECOGNITION AS MARKERS OF COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT: EXPERIMENTAL AND LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS IN HEALTHY ELDERS, MCI AND ALZHEIMER PATIENTS

Dates

01/01/2017 - 31/12/2019

Coordinating Organization

University of Valencia (Spain)

Participating Organizations

University of Valencia (Spain)

Name of the Call

R+D Projects aimed at Society Challenges

Goals

The main objective of this project is to analyze the role that familiarity and wrong recognition play in aging and cognitive impairment. The aim is to provide experimental evidence in relation to the effects of familiarity on the processes of memory with and without neurological pathology in its different types, also analyzing the memory failures involved in the recognition to finally be able to take both variables as markers of cognitive impairment.

Content

The research on the neuropsychology of memory raises different types of memory, based on different neural structures, which evolve differently with healthy aging and cognitive impairment. Although there is unanimity in accepting that healthy aging and cognitive impairment are associated with deficits in the collection associated with recognition, there is great controversy in literature when analyzing the role that aging and cognitive impairment have on familiarity and wrong recognition. Recent experimental data from our laboratory, using an experimental paradigm of associative recognition, show that collecting declines with both healthy aging and cognitive impairment, familiarity remains stable in healthy aging but significantly declines with cognitive impairment, whereas wrong recognition increases in healthy aging (in relation to young people) but it significantly decreases with cognitive impairment (in relation to healthy elders). These preliminary results would suggest that deficits detected in collection, familiarity and wrong recognition in elderly people could be used as early markers of incipient pathological cognitive deterioration. There are two main objectives in this research project. On the one hand, to experimentally confirm this idea using other experimental procedures and other clinical samples (cross-validation studies). On the other hand, to make a longitudinal follow-up (post-test after 2 years) to our samples of healthy elderly people and patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer, in order to analyze what predictors (neuropsychological, relative to their autobiographical memory or relative to the processes involved in recognition: familiarity, collection or wrong recognition) predict its evolution to cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease (or its maintenance).

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