Abstract
Type of material and short-term forgetting in Alzheimer disease and ageing. This study examined whether the low performance of 10 Alzheimer patients in the Brown-Peterson task could be explained by the type of material used (words versus nonsense syllables; and natural versus artificial categories) that differed from 20 elderly controls. Performance of the Alzheimer group with these two materials was also examined six months later. Our data showed that Alzheimer had a lower performance in the three retention intervals than controls but a significant interaction between group and interval or group and material were not found. This indicated that the rate of forgetfulness was similar in the two groups and that the type of material did not deteriorate the performance of the Alzheimer group. No difference was obtained between test and retest in this task.
