Automatic semantic facilitation in Alzheimer's disease

To explore the nature of semantic deficit in Alzheimer's disease patients (AD patients) we compared two tasks that are known to be very different with respect to the type of attentional demand and conscious effort they require: lexical decision (automatic) in a semantic priming paradigm and semantic relatedness judgements (intentional). In order to minimise post-lexical facilitation we devised a semantic priming experiment that met an automatic condition as much as possible, and we selected patients without severe word recognition deficits. AD patients showed reduced accuracy in the semantic relatedness judgements as compared to controls. Some effect of priming was found, but this was weaker than in normals. AD patients also differed from controls on targets preceded by a nonlinguistic prime (neutral condition) where their reaction times were slower as compared to neutral condition.