Musical Memory in Alzheimer Disease

ABSTRACT

This study examines musical memory in 12 patients with moderate or severe AD and 12 healthy, older adult controls. Participants were asked to distinguish familiar from novel tunes, to identify distortions in melodies, and to sing familiar tunes. Comparison of the AD and control groups showed significant impairment of the AD participants. However, a more complex picture emerged as we compared each individual case to the control group. Five of the AD group performed within the control group range on most tasks. An additional four participants showed partial sparing in that they performed below the range of control participants, but their scores were above the level of chance. The final three participants showed near complete loss of musical memory, as their performance was consistently at or near the level of chance. These results are discussed in terms of the literature on the heterogeneity of cognitive presentation in AD.

Keywords:

• Alzheimer disease
• Music cognition
• Cognitive
• Heterogeneity
• Preserved memory
• Aging

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant to L. L. Cuddy, and a GRAMMY® Foundation grant to L. L. Cuddy, J. M. Duffin, and S. Gill, and an Ontario Mental Health Foundation doctoral studentship to A. D. Vanstone. Thanks to Dr Patricia Minnes, Dr Mary C. Olmstead, Dr Jacalyn M. Duffin, and Dr Sudeep Gill for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, to Elizabeth Alexander and Lianne Wong for their research assistance, and to David Keane for consulting on the construction of the unfamiliar distorted tunes. Many thanks as well to Dr Lindy Kilik and Denise Hagerman for their assistance in recruiting patients. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to our participants for taking time to share their experiences and to engage so enthusiastically with the process of collecting these data.

Notes

¹ One AD participant was born in a European country, but she was fluent in English, and had lived in Canada for many years. She demonstrated excellent familiarity with the English tunes used in this study, and so her inclusion was deemed appropriate.