Deficits in spontaneous and stimulus-dependent retrieval as an early sign of abnormal aging

Research on early cognitive markers of Alzheimer’s disease is primarily focused on episodic memory tests that involve deliberate retrieval. Our purpose was to provide clear evidence to support a novel Spontaneous Retrieval Deficit hypothesis, which predicts that people at pre-clinical stages of dementia, including those with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), are particularly impaired on tasks based on spontaneous retrieval. We compared 27 aMCI individuals and 27 healthy controls on mind-wandering while performing a task during which there were exposed to either highly meaningful or unmeaningful pictures. The substantial reduction in mind-wandering among individuals with aMCI was found with exposure to highly meaningful stimuli, but not to unmeaningful pictures, and it was most pronounced for past-oriented thoughts, i.e., involuntary autobiographical memories. Those findings provide strong support for this novel hypothesis, and show that it is the spontaneous, but bottom-up and cue-driven processes, for which meaningful environmental stimuli are crucial, that are very promising early markers of the disease.