JOURNAL OF CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGY 2007, 29 (2), 187–197 © 2006 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business http://www.psypress.com/jcen DOI: 10.1080/13803390600629775 NCEN Verbal learning and memory deficits in Mild Cognitive Impairment MCI - Memory Deficits F. Ribeiro, 1,2 M. Guerreiro, 1,2 and A. De Mendonça 1,3 1 Dementia Clinics, Institute of Molecular Medicine and Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal 2 Laboratory of Language, Institute of Molecular Medicine and Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal 3 Neurology Department and Laboratory of Neurosciences, Institute of Molecular Medicine and Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Criteria for amnestic MCI rely on the use of delayed recall tasks to establish the presence of memory impairment. This study applied the California Verbal Learning Test to detail memory performance in MCI patients (n = 70), as compared to control subjects (n = 92) and AD patients (n = 21). Learning across the 5 trials was different among the 3 groups. Learning strategy was also different, the MCI group showing less semantic clustering than the con- trol group. However, both MCI patients and controls could benefit from semantic cueing. This study showed that beyond consolidation deficits, MCI patients have marked difficulties in acquisition and recall strategies. INTRODUCTION Memory complaints are common in aged people. Some of these aged people experience changes severe enough to bring them to the medical doctor, who nowadays commonly establishes the diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) (de Mendonça, Guerreiro, Ribeiro, Mendes, & Garcia, 2004). MCI patients typically present with memory complaints of unknown etiology and perform below the norms for age and education on neuropsychological memory tests. Nevertheless they have a relatively normal gen- eral cognitive function, maintain their activities of daily living and are not demented (Petersen et al., 1999). Mild Cognitive Impairment, particularly the amnestic type (Petersen et al., 2001a), appears to rep- resent a transition between normal aging and early dementia, since in clinical settings patients with MCI show rates of conversion to dementia, usually Alzhe- imer’s disease (AD), of about 12% per year (Petersen et al., 1999). Criteria for amnestic MCI make use of scores in delayed recall of episodic memory tasks to establish the presence of memory impairment (Win- blad et al., 2004; see Arnaiz & Almkvist, 2003 for a review on memory deficits in MCI and AD). How- ever, poor delayed recall can reflect deficits in distinct memory processes: encoding, consolidation and ret- rieval. The contribution of these processes to the observed deficit is still unclear (Arnaiz & Almkvist, 2003). Deficits in semantic memory were also found in MCI as in AD patients (Dudas, Claghe, Thompson, Graham, & Hodges, 2005). Furthermore, recent work has called attention to the relevance of examining memory deficits in areas other than declarative mem- ory, by using verbal and nonverbal priming tests (Perri et al., 2005). Impairments in other cognitive domains, such as orientation, attention, executive functions and visuospatial abilities, may also be found in patients with MCI (Grundman et al., 2004; Ribeiro, Guerreiro, & de Mendonça, in press). Detailed know- ledge of the memory processes disturbed in MCI should contribute to the understanding of the patho- physiology of MCI, and help to delineate future reha- bilitation interventions in these patients. In order to characterize the MCI memory profile under the present study, a well known test of verbal Address correspondence to Filipa Ribeiro, Laboratory of Language, Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon, Av. Prof. Egas Moniz, 1649-028 Lisbon, Portugal (E-mail: piparibeiro@mail.telepac.pt).