Appraisal of Memory Functioning and Memory Performance in Healthy Ageing and Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease

ABSTRACT

Background/Aims: To compare memory evaluations in healthy older people and people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and present standardised individual and dyadic methods for classifying degree of memory awareness in the participants with dementia. Methods: Cross-sectional study evaluating awareness of memory functioning and performance and providing normative data for healthy individuals and couples, together with comparison data from people with AD. Results: As a group, older people are reasonably accurate raters of their own memory functioning and performance, although considerable individual differences can be observed, and control dyads show good comparative accuracy. Comparing normative data from the control group to data from participants with AD confirms that significant overestimation is a frequent feature among people with dementia, with approximately two-thirds showing this pattern, although significant under-estimation is also reliably observed in a small proportion of people with dementia. Different types of measure elicit different profiles of memory awareness in participants with dementia. Conclusion: Normative data from older individuals and couples provides useful percentile-based indices for determining level of memory awareness in people with dementia.

Keywords:

• Awareness
• Anosognosia
• Deficit identification
• Metamemory
• Insight
• Monitoring
• Prediction
• Normative data
• Standardisation
• Comparative accuracy

Linda Clare acknowledges funding support from the UK Alzheimer's Society and the ESRC (RES-062-23-037). We are grateful to research assistants Caroline Parkinson and Anthony Martyr, to MSc students Katherine Algar, Deirdre Allen, Lisa Caddell, Sarah Dilnot, Nicola Fantom, Aleksandra Kudlicka, Samantha Lake, Emily Newton and Anna Watts, and to PhD students Judith Roberts, Julia Robinson and Jorien van Paasschen for contributions to data collection and data management. We would like to thank Professor Robin Morris for helpful comments and discussion.