Spared recognition capacity in elderly and closed-head-injury subjects with clinical memory deficits

Abstract

This study describes the performance of three groups of subjects on a pictorial forced-recognition task, the Hundred Pictures Test. The aim was to determine whether subjects with memory deficits (elderly and closed-head-injured subjects) would perform as well as healthy young subjects, both on immediate and very long-term recognition. The results indicate that memory for complex meaningful pictures is spared in subjects with an otherwise impaired memory, and that despite increasing forgetting rates with increasing retention intervals (up to 27 weeks), still no differences are found between performance of these subjects and healthy young controls. It will be discussed how this result might be interpreted.