Verbal Encoding Deficits Impact Recognition Memory in Atypical “Non-Amnestic” Alzheimer’s Disease

Memory encoding and retrieval deficits have been identified in atypical Alzheimer’s disease (AD), including posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) and logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA), despite these groups being referred to as “non-amnestic”. There is a critical need to better understand recognition memory in atypical AD. We investigated performance on the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT-II-SF) in 23 amyloid-positive, tau-positive, and neurodegeneration-positive participants with atypical “non-amnestic” variants of AD (14 PCA, 9 lvPPA) and 14 amnestic AD participants. Recognition memory performance was poor across AD subgroups but trended toward worse in the amnestic group. Encoding was related to recognition memory in non-amnestic but not in amnestic AD. We also observed cortical atrophy in dissociable subregions of the distributed memory network related to encoding (left middle temporal and angular gyri, posterior cingulate and precuneus) compared to recognition memory (anterior medial temporal cortex). We conclude that recognition memory is not spared in all patients with atypical variants of AD traditionally thought to be “non-amnestic”. The non-amnestic AD patients with poor recognition memory were those who struggled to encode the material during the learning trials. In contrast, the amnestic AD group had poor recognition memory regardless of encoding ability.