What does the family pictures subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III measure? Insight gained from patients evaluated for epilepsy surgery.

The Family Pictures (FP) task is a new subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale Version III (WMS-III) used to assess visual memory and learning. This study assessed the extent to which different cognitive abilities contribute to performance on the FP task in 125 patients evaluated for epilepsy surgery. Results indicated that the FP task relies heavily on auditory-verbal based cognitive abilities, as well as visual memory, and may better represent a general measure of memory performance. These results raise questions about the appropriateness of including FP task performance in the calculations of the WMS-III Visual Index scores.