Assessing Episodic and Semantic Autobiographical Recall in Healthy Older APOE ε4 Carriers

Sacripante, Riccardo, James, Tabitha, Melega, Greta, Lancelotte, Fiona, Johnen, Ann-Kathrin, Lopez Saquisili, Cristian, Lidstrom, Andreas, Niu, Lingzi, Goddard, Kayleigh, Fountain, Samuel, Clark, Ian, Blake, Josh, Hornberger, Michael, Levine, Brian and Renoult, Louis (2025) Assessing Episodic and Semantic Autobiographical Recall in Healthy Older APOE ε4 Carriers. Psychology and Aging. ISSN 0882-7974 (In Press)

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Abstract

The APOE ε4 gene is associated with increased risk of developing sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Several studies have focused on declarative memory, where episodic memory deficits are reported in ε4 carriers, while semantic memory has received much less attention. To clarify whether the impact of APOE ε4 on declarative memory is specific to episodic memory, we administered a novel measure of autobiographical memory, the Semantic Autobiographical Interview (SAI). Thirty-eight healthy older adults were recruited, 19 ε4 carriers and 19 non-carriers, matched in age, education, and gender. The groups did not significantly differ in any neuropsychological tests except for recognition memory, where ε4 carriers showed reduced performance. On the original Autobiographical Interview (AI), results revealed a reduced number of target details in carriers. Together, these results suggest a reduction of episodic specificity in ε4 carriers. In contrast, carriers had very similar semantic production to non-carriers, whether it was for off-task semantic details in the AI, or on-task general and personal semantic details produced in the SAI. These results suggest that older adults retain the gist of their personal experience and that the semanticization of their autobiographical narratives is robust and less sensitive to risk for AD than episodic memory.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Scored data and additional online materials are available at the project’s Open Science Framework (OSF) page at https://osf.io/ewdzu/?view_only=8c57930ba2754594a0c6968c91403128 (raw data cannot be provided as they cannot be fully anonymised).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	autobiographical memory,episodic memory,personal semantic memory,apoe,aging
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	11 Dec 2025 12:31
Last Modified:	16 Dec 2025 01:22
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101368
DOI:

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