USING CONDITIONAL DISCRIMINATION PROCEDURES TO STUDY REMEMBERING IN AN ALZHEIMER'S PATIENT

Dementia is characterized by memory impairment, but it has been suggested that conditional discrimination procedures can be used to study remembering behavior. The paper presents an experiment in which conditional discrimination procedures were used with a patient diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The purpose of the study was two‐fold: (i) compare performance during arbitrary and identity matching‐to sample (MTS) tasks and (ii) study the effect of different delays on the participant's responding. The results show that the participant did not respond correctly on the arbitrary MTS tasks but respond correctly on the simultaneous identity MTS tasks. Thus, the participant responded correctly on identity MTS tasks with a 0‐s delay and also with 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐s delays; the number of incorrect responses increased with the increasing delay duration. Furthermore, the results also indicate that it is possible to use the delayed matching‐to‐sample procedure to evaluate the effect of medication given to Alzheimer's patients. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.