Context Memory in Alzheimer's Disease: The "Who, Where, and When"

Abstract

Objective: Context memory, a component of episodic system, refers to the ability to retrieve conditions under which an event has occurred, such as who was present during that event and where and when it occurred. Context memory has been found to be compromised in older adults, an issue that we investigated in Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: Thirty-one participants with AD and 35 older adults were asked to generate three autobiographical events. Afterward, they were asked to remember the names of all people who were evoked during the events, and the names for any location that was mentioned during the events. Participants were also asked to remember the year, season, month and day of the week when the events occurred.

Results: Compared to older adults, participants with AD showed lower memory for "who" (p < .001), "where" (p < .05), and "when" (p < .01). Compared to "who" and "where", both participants with AD and older adults showed pronounced difficulties in remembering the "when".

Conclusion: these findings highlight difficulties in remembering temporal information as an indication of context memory decline in AD. The difficulties in retrieving temporal information are discussed in terms of timing failures and hippocampal degenerations in AD.