Memory improvement at different stages of Alzheimer's disease.

Three groups of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (mildly, moderately and severely demented) and two groups of healthy older adults (73 and 82 yr old) were examined on free and cued recall of subject-performed tasks (SPTs) or verbally presented sentences depicting the same verbal information as the SPTs. Results indicated that all groups examined performed better on SPTs than on the verbal task. In addition, for all groups cuing effects were greater in the SPT task than in the verbal task.