ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the data from laboratory animals and discusses their varying levels of impairments and how the relates to clinical findings in human studies. In a symposium on aging and Alzheimer’s disease, a number of investigators reiterated the value of non-human primates as an animal model of human aging. Monkeys have a rich behavioral repertoire that lends itself suitably to translational studies of human cognition. The literature on memory dysfunction in human aging is voluminous and several reviews and books have been devoted to the subject. In nonhuman primates, studies of frontal lobe function, the area of the cortex involved in mediating executive function and working memory, date back to the 1930s with Jacobsen’s classical studies of the delayed response task in the chimpanzee. The Delayed Nonmatching to Sample task is a benchmark recognition memory task that assesses the subject’s ability to identify a novel stimulus from a familiar stimulus following a specific delay interval.
