The temporal organization and quality of life story memories in Alzheimer disease and healthy controls.

Objective: Autobiographical memory has been studied in Alzheimer's disease (AD) by asking for a specified number of memories from a few defined life periods. The present study tests whether a retrograde temporal gradient and a change in the quality of memory specificity is confirmed when using a temporally less restrained access to autobiographical memory. Also, we intended to explore the temporal macrostructure of entire life narratives in AD and to study in more detail the distribution of memories across the past life and the narrativity of memory reports.

Method: Twenty-one elderly adults with mild to moderate AD (Mage = 79.0; M Mini-Mental State Exam = 20.6) were compared with 20 healthy controls (Mage = 76.15, M Mini-Mental State Exam = 29.2). Participants were ethnic Germans from a rural southwestern area of Germany. They provided five most important memories and then told their entire life for up to 15 min. Life narratives were divided into temporal-thematic segments, which were dated and coded for memory specificity as well as for proportion of narrative clauses (narrativity).

Results: Life narratives in AD were shorter and contained proportionally fewer specific memories and fewer narrative clauses. These differences regarded the remembered period from between mid-30s to the recent past, for which also far fewer memories were produced. Life narratives were less chronological.

Conclusions: Maintaining a sense of self-sameness in AD relies less and less on life narratives but more on single-event narratives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).