Familiarity-based memory in healthy and pathological aging

In healthy older adults, episodic memory decline is due to poorer remembering of details and context of events (i.e., recollection). On the other hand, the feeling of oldness (or familiarity) for the information previously encountered is intact. We built on this preserved memory process to design methods that can mitigate age-related differences in memory performance. In Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, we attempted to improve patients' memory performance using the same methods that were effective in the elderly. Instead of improving performance, we found that patients struggled with these tasks. Further exploration of this result revealed that there are several types of familiarity and that only familiarity for entities (i.e., exemplars of objects characterized by the unique conjunction of their features) is altered in early Alzheimer's disease and is related to atrophy of the transentorhinal cortex. With my research team, we proposed a memory model that integrates this discovery with current conceptions of memory.