Effect of Amnesia Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Diseaseon Recognition Memory of Elderly Peoplein Shiraz Verbal Learning Test: Differences in Recognition Discriminability and Response Bias

Background: Most studies have investigated the effect of brain pathological aging on information recall and recognition memory performance of patients (by using a yes/no procedure), and for this reason, provide a partial picture of memory deficits and other factors involved in recognition memory such as discriminability and response bias are not considered. In this regard, the aim of present study was to explore the effect of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer disease on the subtests of recognition memory (recognition discriminability index and response bias) in the SVLT.    Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on 190 eligible elderly people aged 60-89 years in 1400. The data collection tools were SVLT and MMSE. We used SPSS.19 software to perform descriptive (frequency, mean and standard deviations) and analytical data (ANOVA and Scheffe test), and the significance level was set at P<0.05. Results: The results showed that the patients with aMCI and Alzheimer’s disease scored significantly worse than the normal elderly people on recognition memory performance (Scheffe, p<0.001). Also, the obtained results indicated that elderly with aMCI and Alzheimer’s disease compared to normal elderly people had lower scores and more false positive in recognition discriminability index (global, semantic, source, and new) (Scheffe, p<0.001). When it came to response bias, AD patients received significantly higher scores than older people with aMCI and normal elderly (Scheffe, p<0.001).    Conclusion: The present research findings suggested that exploring the nature of recognition memory performance (recognition discriminability) in aMCI is useful information to predict progression to AD dementia from the prodromal stage.