Keynote address: Familiarity-based recognition memory in normal and pathological aging

In healthy older adults, the decline in episodic memory is due to poorer memory for details and context of events (or recollection). On the other hand, the feeling of familiarity for the information encountered previously is intact. We have built on this preserved memory process to design methods to mitigate age-related differences in memory performance. In Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, we have attempted to improve patients' memory performance using these same methods. But this did not improve their performance. On the contrary, we found that patients had difficulty completing these tasks. Further exploration of this result revealed that there are several types of familiarity and that only familiarity for entities (i.e., examples of objects characterized by the unique conjunction of their traits) 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 into current conceptions of memory.