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Incidental recall on WAIS‐R digit symbol discriminates Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases
Author(s) -
Demakis George J.,
Sawyer Thomas P.,
Fritz Dawn,
Sweet Jerry J.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.124
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1097-4679
pISSN - 0021-9762
DOI - 10.1002/jclp.1020
Subject(s) - psychology , wechsler adult intelligence scale , recall , cognition , audiology , memory span , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , episodic memory , wechsler memory scale , numerical digit , memoria , working memory , arithmetic , neuroscience , medicine , mathematics
The purpose of this study was to examine how Alzheimer's ( n = 37) and Parkinson's ( n = 21) patients perform on the incidental recall adaptation to the Digit Symbol of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised (WAIS‐R) and how such performance is related to established cognitive efficiency and memory measures. This adaptation requires the examinee to complete the entire subtest and then, without warning, to immediately recall the symbols associated with each number. Groups did not differ significantly on standard Digit Symbol administration (90 seconds), but on recall Parkinson's patients recalled significantly more symbols and symbol‐number pairs than Alzheimer's patients. Using only the number of symbols recalled, discriminate function analysis correctly classified 76% of these patients. Correlations between age‐corrected scaled score, symbols incidentally recalled, and established measures of cognitive efficiency and memory provided evidence of convergent and divergent validity. Age‐corrected scaled scores were more consistently and strongly related to cognitive efficiency, whereas symbols recalled were more consistently and strongly related to memory measures. These findings suggest that the Digit Symbol recall adaptation is actually assessing memory and that it can be another useful way to detect memory impairment. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 57: 387–394, 2001.