Intact primary memory in mild to moderate Alzheimer disease: indices from the California Verbal Learning Test

The California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT; Delis, Kramer, Kaplan, & Ober, 1987) was administered to patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer disease (AD) (Group AD; n = 13) and to a control group of normal older adults (Group NC; n = 13) matched on age and education. Two measures were used to determine whether primary memory (PM) is impaired in early AD. One measure, considered a relatively "pure" measure of PM, is based on the procedure developed by Tulving and Colotla (1970) which considers an item to be recalled from PM if no more than six items intervene between its presentation and recall. The other measure is the more commonly used recall from recency. No significant difference between the AD and NC Groups was found, both on the Tulving and Colotla measure, as well as on the recall from recency measure of PM. A significant difference was obtained on two measures of secondary memory (SM), namely, Tulving and Colotla's measure and recall from the primacy and middle regions of the list of words. In comparison to NC, and AD patients showed little evidence of learning over the five trials, and poor retention even over short delays. In addition, the patients with AD showed deficits in clustering words by taxonomic category at recall. We conclude that impairment in PM cannot be used as a diagnostic marker of AD in the early stages of the disease process.