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IMPAIRED SELF–RECOGNITION FROM RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS IN A CASE OF LATE–STAGE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

IMPAIRED SELF–RECOGNITION FROM RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS IN A CASE OF LATE–STAGE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE. A Case study by Jessica A. Hehman, Tim P. German, and Stanley B. Klein Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 2005. A Presentation by Amarallys Cintron.

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IMPAIRED SELF–RECOGNITION FROM RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS IN A CASE OF LATE–STAGE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

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  1. IMPAIRED SELF–RECOGNITION FROM RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS IN A CASE OF LATE–STAGE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE A Case study by Jessica A. Hehman, Tim P. German, and Stanley B. Klein Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 2005 A Presentation by Amarallys Cintron

  2. Stage Characteristics Initial Stage Early Stage Intermediate Stage Late Stage End Stage Mild forgetfulness Increase word-finding problems, decline in spatial memory General cognitive deficits in reasoning and judgment; help needed in common daily tasks Person may not recognize family members, loss of communicative skills; Death Stages of Alzheimer’s

  3. Sense of Self • Patients with late stage Alzheimer’s demonstrate a loss of sense of self • Late stage patients exhibit a decline in use of personal pronouns and changes in the content of self–narratives • A late stage patient from a previous study, K.R. could correctly identify her personality characteristics although they were “out of date”

  4. Objective • To determine the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the concept of one’s self • Hypothesis: Alzheimer’s disease entails a gradual breakdown in the mechanisms used to acquire and update personal knowledge

  5. Participant • P.H. • 83 year old woman • Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1996 • Otherwise in good health and under the treatment of Aricept • P.H. was given the Mini Mental State Exam and got a score of 7. A score of 22 or less is considered “definitely abnormal” for her age group.

  6. Experiment • Photos of P.H. are categorized by decade from her 20s to her 70s • She asked if she recognized the person in the photo, then she was asked to identify the person and give information about the picture

  7. Results • Pictures from her 20s and 30s were correctly identified seven out of eight times • Pictures from her 40s to 70s were correctly identified only twice out of 20 times

  8. What does this tell us? • Alzheimer’s disease may degrade self memory in such a way as to leave remnants of earlier representational states including personality and one’s appearance. • This could prove that Alzheimer’s disease impairs routines that update assorted databases of self–related knowledge

  9. What could cause this? • It is proposed that Alzheimer’s may cause a temporally graded breakdown in semantic self knowledge • This can account both for patient K.R.’s inability to update her semantic self–knowledge for personality changes taking place • Also accounts for patient P.H.’s problems recognizing herself from pictures taken during the later decades of her life.

  10. What is unknown? • Could this gradual breakdown caused by Alzheimer’s be treatable? • Would this breakdown preserve all self memories in the earlier decades of life or just some?

  11. Questions?

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