Schedule of Events | Symposia

Familiarity Deficits in aMCI: Insights from Event-Related Potentials and Skin Conductance Response

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Evi Myftaraj^1,2 (emyftaraj@research.baycrest.org), Hannah Del Gatto^1,2, Nicole Anderson^1,2,3; ¹Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Academy for Research and Education, ²Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, ³Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

Familiarity, the sense of knowing without the recollection of specific details, is a critical component of memory processing. This cognitive ability is mediated by the perirhinal cortex, a brain region essential for differentiating objects with high feature overlap and one of the first areas affected in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Event-related potential (ERP) and skin conductance response (SCR) studies show more familiarity-based positive responses to old items between 300-500ms post-stimulus onset (N400) and larger SCR amplitudes and longer SCR latencies. In the present study, healthy younger adults, healthy older adults, and older adults with aMCI completed a frequency judgment task for highly similar items, with ERP and SCR measures collected. Preliminary results indicate that individuals with aMCI have the poorest performance in correctly identifying how often an object was presented. Among those with aMCI, reduced performance was associated with smaller N400 amplitudes, as well as smaller SCR amplitudes and shorter latencies. Results suggest that biomarkers of familiarity, as assessed through ERP and SCR measures, may prove useful for early detection of cognitive decline in individuals at risk of dementia. This work could potentially offer new insights into the use of biomarkers of familiarity to monitor cognitive decline and facilitate early intervention.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging