While it could be argued that this spared memory for landmarks is due to more attention being directed at objects at decision points, our results clearly counter this explanation, since highly attended landmarks were remembered worse than less attended landmarks in AD.
The first is spared memory for familiar music in AD (Cuddy and Duffin 2005), and the other is the relatively slower rate of cortical atrophy of the MPFC compared with other brain areas during the progression of AD (Thompson et al. 2003).
It supports three test modes: (1) main memory testing, (2) spare memory testing, and (3) repair.
Our stringent genetic and pharmacological analyses are also consistent with human and animal studies showing that NMDA receptor antagonists generally spare memory retrieval [19] [25].
The dissociation in the present study between recognition memory (spared) and recency memory (impaired) was unusually compelling, because it was possible to test the same objects for both forms of memory within the same session and within the same apparatus.
One possible explanation for inconsistency might be the potency of the context memory conditioning procedure, as the experiments showing spared remote memory used a greater number of context-shock pairings, likely creating a stronger context fear memory.
Although both the parahippocampal gyrus and the hippocampus have been found to be implicated in mnemonic object-location binding [35], [36], a previous study investigating object-location memory in virtual rooms has demonstrated spared implicit memory for object-location as well in AD patients [37].
It would be intriguing if the extratemporal substrates of musical memory identified by Jacobsen and colleagues turned out to be a signature of spared musical memory in semantic dementia as well as (or instead of) Alzheimer's disease.
Angela Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, was the first German chancellor spared any memory of the Hitler years.
Furthermore, like healthy controls, both sleepwalkers and the patients with REM sleep behavior disorder improved their performance, thus showing spared overnight memory consolidation processes.
Realizing such delayed intentions critically depends on rostral prefrontal cortex functioning (rPFC; approximating Brodmann area [BA] 10): Lesions to this region lead to impairments in PM, typically in the context of spared episodic memory abilities (Burgess et al. 2000, 2009; Roca et al. 2010; Uretzky and Gilboa 2010; Volle et al. 2011).
