False recall in older adults and Alzheimer's linked to attention, not memory,...( ofinformation to be activated. Higher ...),Health

of information to be activated. Higher strategic processing skills are then required to sort through these jumbled recollections and associations, discarding those that seem out of touch with reality and focusing on those that most meet the needs of the current task at hand.

Current models in experimental psychology emphasize the importance of a particular strategic information processing function -- attentional control systems -- in both the encoding and retrieval of information in memory. These attentional systems, Balota explains, allow a person to keep focused on a particular topic (the understanding of this text, for example) while inhibiting irrelevant information that is also impinging on the senses (the way in which your third toe feels on your left foot, which is also providing a signal to the brain but is not consciously apprehended until you select that pathway).

The ability to maintain attention to the mental task at hand is critical to the memory retrieval process because the mind must constantly weigh and choose among various streams of potentially relevant information that flood into the conscious mind from the memory network. For instance, the ability to retrieve useful information about "organs" during the following sentence "The musician was pleased to hear about the sale of pianos and organs at the music store" requires that the mind be able to quickly recognize and discard tangentially related information, such as information about "organs" of the human body.

Attention breakdown
The notion now being put forth by Balota and other Alzheimer's researchers is that the underlying structure of the knowledge-based memory system remains relatively intact, at least during early stages of Alzheimer's, while critical strategic information processing systems in the brain's frontal lobe begin to break down. The loss of these strategic information processing skills, such as the ability to maintain attention on the memory task at hand, m
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Contact: Gerry Everding
gerry_everding@aismail.wustl.edu
314-935-6375
Washington University in St. Louis
4-Jun-1999

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