Clinical administration and interpretation of the Turkish-adapted Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test: A narrative review and practitioner's guide
Jbid Dursun-Uncu1
, Zerrin Yıldırım2, Çiğdem Ulaşoğlu-Yıldız3, İbrahim Hakan Gürvit1
1Department of Neurology, Behavioural Neurology and Movement Disorders Unit, İstanbul University, İstanbul Faculty of Medicine, İstanbul, Türkiye
2Department of Neurology, Bağcılar Training and Research Hospital, İstanbul, Türkiye
3Department of Neuroscience, İstanbul University, Aziz Sancar Institute of Experimental Medicine, İstanbul, Türkiye
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, clinical administration, FCSRT, guide, memory tests.
Abstract
This narrative review aimed to provide a clinically oriented narrative review and standardized guide for the administration, scoring, and interpretation of the three parallel Turkish forms of the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT-16TR). The guide integrated the theoretical basis of controlled encoding and encoding specificity with evidence from international FCSRT studies and the established Turkish protocol. It addressed protocol variability, appropriate clinical populations, preadministration requirements, step-by-step procedures, scoring variables, recognition errors, and boundaries of interpretation. Free and cued recall should be interpreted as a pattern rather than as isolated scores. Improvement with category cueing may support a retrieval-based account, whereas persistently poor recall despite verified encoding and cueing is more consistent with impaired storage; neither pattern is etiologically specific. Recognition findings, language and semantic abilities, sensory limitations, demographic context, longitudinal change, and the broader cognitive and neurological assessment must also be considered. In conclusion, standardized administration and version-specific, pattern-based interpretation can improve the consistency and clinical usefulness of the FCSRT-16TR. The test supports diagnostic reasoning but should not be used as a stand-alone diagnostic instrument.
Cite this article as: Dursun-Uncu J, Yıldırım Z, Ulaşoğlu-Yıldız Ç, Gürvit İH. Clinical administration and interpretation of the Turkish-adapted Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test: A narrative review and practitioner's guide. Turk J Neurol 2026;32(3):199-206. https://doi.org/10.55697/tnd.2026.828.
The standardized FCSRT16TR materials are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request for appropriate clinical or research use. To preserve test security, the complete word lists and category cues should not be reproduced in publicly accessible publications or materials.
J.D.U.: Conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, formal analysis, translation and cultural adaptation of the test, writing-original draft; Z.Y.: Participant recruitment, resources, writing-review and editing of an earlier version of the manuscript; Ç.U.Y.: Formal analysis, interpretation of findings, writing-review and editing; İ.H.G.: Conceptualization, supervision, project administration, writing-review and editing. The final version of the manuscript was approved by all authors able to provide approval.
The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/ or publication of this article.
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
The authors declare that artificial intelligence (AI) tools were used solely to support language editing and improve textual clarity. These tools had no role in data analysis or the formulation of scientific conclusions. All scientific content, data interpretation, and conclusions remain the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors further confirm that AI tools were not used to generate or fabricate references and that all references were independently verified for accuracy.