P1‐487: The measurement of normal and abnormal age‐related declines in human cognitive function

fluency task (type of word e.g. noun, verb). Results: Decreased performance was seen in tasks assessing verbal and visuospatial long-term memory in the older adults compared with young controls (and a further decline was detectable in the patient groups). On the category fluency task, older adults produced later acquired and less familiar words than the young controls, while on the letter fluency task no differenceswere seen.Comparedwith the patient groups, the older adults produced significantly more word, which also were significantly higher in AoA, less familiar and less typical on the category fluency task, with older adults producing more words (involving the production of both more nouns and verbs) on the letter fluency task also. No significant differences between patient groupswere found for either the lexical characteristic or type of word analyses. Conclusions: The non-specific decline in verbal and visuospatial long-term memory tasks observable in both the older adults and the patient groups suggests that impairment in these cognitive functions does not necessarily signal pathological brain aging. In contrast, no aging effects were seen on either of the verbal fluency tasks with the older adults either outperforming or showing similar performance to the young controls. Both fluency tasks appeared useful at discriminating normal from pathological brain aging, not only in established AD but also at the preclinical MCI stage. Notably, by combining number of words produced with the lexical characteristics or word type analysis, an even more successful and accurate discrimination can be made.