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

If familiarity is better preserved than recollection in aging and in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease (Koen & Yonelinas, 2014), the experimental conditions promoting its use should be beneficial to these populations. One condition influencing the relative contribution of recollection and familiarity during recognition is the format of the test. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of test format on recollection and familiarity in normal aging and in MCI in two tasks where the level of performance is equalized. Seventy young participants, 70 younger-old (55-69 years old), 69 older-old (70-85 years old), and 13 MCIs were presented with forced-choice and yes/no visual recognition memory tasks with the Remember/Know/ Guess paradigm. Young participants had better recognition memory 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.