Impaired recall and the memory disturbance in presenile dementia.

Although subjects with presenile dementia have a very poor ability to retrieve material previously presented for learning under conditions of free recall and the usual type of recognition test, their performance was found to be not significantly different from normal controls when the initial letters of the correct words were provided at the time of recall. This finding raises the possibility that the long-term memory failure in presenile dementia may not be due to an inability to establish new material in the long-term store, as had previously been thought, but to a difficulty in retrieving that information.