Aged and young adults were tested by category cued recall after learning with category cues (CCR) or with item cues (ICR). CCR was about twice ICR for both aged and young adults. The aged recalled less than the young and did not benefit as much from greater encoding specificity and deeper processing in CCR. ICR and CCR were correlated, so that expected CCR can be predicted from ICR. The regression of CCR on ICR was linear for young adults, but was piecewise linear for the aged, showing that the relationship between ICR and CCR was not uniform for the aged adults. Lower than expected CCR by a subset of aged without clinical dementia may be a sign of preclinical dementia. (JINS, 1995, I, 483–493.)

Impaired recall for early items (primacy) and late items (recency) on word list recall tests are seen in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We compared conventional scoring on the Telephone Instrument for Cognitive Status (TICS) recall list with scorings based on retention-weighted recall (RWR: each item weighted by its serial position) in older adults participating in a community-based aging study. Subjects with mild AD (N = 18) did not differ from those without dementia (N = 231) with respect to recency (46% vs. 59%, p = 0.2), but had impaired primacy (2% vs. 39%, p < .001) on word recall on the TICS. RWR scoring improved the effect size (1.52 SD) compared to conventional scoring (1.08 SD). With a fixed sensitivity of 85%, specificity was lower using conventional scoring (56%) than RWR (76%) scoring. Our findings suggest that optimized RWR scoring of word list free recall can improve detection of mild AD compared to conventional scoring. (JINS, 2006, 12, 436–440.)