Key words: Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, dementia, learning, memory, symptom validity

"Visual Associative Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease and Performance Validity"

The studies described in this dissertation are aimed at the functioning of the episodic memory along the range from normal aging to mild Alzheimer dementia and to what extent this knowledge is useful for the detection of underperformance in different groups of patients. The results of the described studies show that the general idea that the episodic memory disorder of Alzheimer patients is characterized by only poor consolidation is too limited and that this should be extended with our findings that the type of retrieval process and type of support in retrieving learned information also moderates the degree of memory disorder of Alzheimer patients. This knowledge also appears to be useful in distinguishing underperforming patients from patients with a memory disorder.