Free Article Review On Improving Delayed Face Recognition In Alzheimers Disease By Differential Outcomes

The article of Angeles F. Estevez "Improving Delayed Face Recognition in Alzheimer’s Disease by Differential Outcomes" contains the analysis and the description of an experiment that was constructed and carried out in order to find out whether the differential outcomes procedure (DOP) will affect the results of the patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) completing a delayed matching-to-sample task. For the accuracy of the experiment the participants were divided into two groups, eight people in each. The first group contained AD patients in phase 4 of Reisberg's deterioration scale, the second group were healthy controls (HC). The main purpose of the study was to detect whether DOP may help to eliminate the face recognition memory deficit, in case of the positive result this method may be implied to other memory training tasks directed to facilitate the everyday activities of the patients.
The participants were showed a photograph with the face of the man, then after 5 and 25 seconds delay they were showed a block of four pictures with the men’s faces, including the one showed previously. In case of the correct answer an image of the possible prize appeared on the board, moreover each sample face was associated with a specific prize image. If the answer was incorrect, or there was no reply during 10 seconds, no image appeared on the board. According to the statistics HC group showed more accurate results both in differential and nondifferential outcomes condition. The AD group performed better results in DOP with 5 seconds delay (85% accuracy), 25 seconds delay lessened the results to 75%. The reaction time statistics also proved the benefits of DOP for the patients, as their reaction was faster (4634 ms vs. 5926 ms) than in nondifferential procedure.
The results of the study turned out to be quite positive and proved that DOP method may be used as therapeutical technique in order to improve not only face recognition memory, but also other everyday life activities of the patients where memory is involved.
The focus of the article was to show the advantages of the differential outcomes procedure opposed to nondifferential. The author emphasized that this was the first time when DOP method proved to give positive results, and this may be the beginning of the great discoveries.