Self-referential processing in Alzheimer's disease: two different ways of processing self-knowledge?

Two previous studies showed that self-reference encoding had no effect on Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients' recollective experience when it was compared to other-reference encoding, whereas it did have an effect when it was compared to semantic processing, but only for emotional trait adjectives. In the present study, the performance of 22 AD patients was compared with that of 21 normal controls on a task involving recognition of emotional versus neutral adjective traits following self-reference versus other-reference encoding, using the remember/know/guess paradigm. Results showed that although AD patients had a positive explicit view of themselves, their self became salient for negative adjective traits only. We concluded that there might exist two ways of processing self-referential knowledge in human cognition: one explicit and the other more implicit.