Recollection versus familiarity in normal aging and in mild cognitive impairment: Impact of test format

Objectives. Memory retrieval typically involves a combination of recollection and familiarity. However, test format can promote one or the other process (Norman & O’Reilly, 2003). The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of test format on recollection and familiarity in normal aging and in mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Methods. Seventy young participants (18-30 years), 65 “younger-old” (55- 69 years), 53 “older-old” (70-85 years), and 13 MCIs (55-82 years) were enrolled. In the “forced-choice” task, they had to recognize which picture, among three, was presented during the encoding stage. In the “yes/no” task, they had to judge whether each item, successively presented, was previously seen or not. In each task, they had to give a “Remember/Know/Guess” judgment.
Results. Group × Format repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that young people had better recognition performance (d’) than “younger-old”, which were better than “older-old” and MCIs. Moreover, young people used familiarity more accurately than both groups of old participants and MCIs, with MCIs being equivalent to “younger-old” and “older-old”. However, MCIs displayed a high rate of familiarity-based false alarms. The resort to recollection decreased with age and in MCIs. Finally, Group × Format interaction revealed that young people (but not the other groups) could use recollection more often in the “forcedchoice” task compared to the “yes/no” task.
Conclusions. Recollection and familiarity decline progressively in healthy aging. In MCI, recollection is more affected than familiarity, but patients demonstrated a more liberal use of familiarity. Finally, test format did not influence strongly the results.