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

The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of test format on recollection and familiarity in normal aging and in MCI. Seventy young participants, 65 younger-old, 53 older-old, and 13 MCIs were presented with forced-choice and yes/no visual recognition memory tasks with the Remember/Know/Guess paradigm. The young people had better recognition performance than younger-old, who performed better than older-old and MCIs. Recollection and familiarity declined progressively in healthy aging. In MCI, recollection was more affected than familiarity, but patients demonstrated a more liberal use of familiarity. Finally, test format did not influence strongly the results. Young people used recollection more often in the forced-choice task compared to the yes/no task.