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dc.contributor.advisorJohnson, David
dc.contributor.authorWang, Clarice
dc.date.accessioned2015-12-11T23:58:19Z
dc.date.available2015-12-11T23:58:19Z
dc.date.issued2015-08-31
dc.date.submitted2015
dc.identifier.otherhttp://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13565
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1808/19193
dc.description.abstractCharacterization and clinical detection of early Alzheimer's disease is difficult due to significant neurocognitive variability present in both healthy and pathological aging. This poses a problem for memory and aging studies because individuals categorized as healthy may actually have an early or `preclinical' AD, which may contaminate results. This study addressed these concerns by 1) using a novel prose recall task designed to elicit subtle changes in episodic memory that occur in early AD 2) examining neural activity of high- and low-performing older adults to reduce within-group variability and differentiate healthy from pathological brain activity. The prose recall task was extremely sensitive (81.8% sensitivity and 100% specificity for mean expository and narrative recall; 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity for expository stories alone) in differentiating healthy older adults from those with very mild AD. fMRI results showed evidence that high-performers retain the ability to recruit specialized regions of the brain during encoding of prose, while low-performers overrecruit nonspecific areas and strongly resemble adults with very mild AD. This suggests that high-performers engage in compensatory brain activity which may reflect a healthy aging process, while low-performers exhibit signs of dedifferentiation which may reflect a disease process.
dc.format.extent91 pages
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherUniversity of Kansas
dc.rightsCopyright held by the author.
dc.subjectClinical psychology
dc.subjectPsychology
dc.subjectNeurosciences
dc.subjectaging
dc.subjectAlzheimer's Disease
dc.subjectcompensation
dc.subjectdedifferentiation
dc.subjectfMRI
dc.subjectprose
dc.titlefMRI of Prose Comprehension in High- and Low-Performing Older Adults
dc.typeDissertation
dc.contributor.cmtememberAtchley, Ruth Ann
dc.contributor.cmtememberDenney, Douglas
dc.contributor.cmtememberFiorentino, Robert
dc.contributor.cmtememberVidoni, Eric
dc.thesis.degreeDisciplinePsychology
dc.thesis.degreeLevelPh.D.
dc.rights.accessrightsopenAccess


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