Rey's 15-Item Visual Memory Test for the Detection of Malingering: Normative Observations on Patients With Neurological Disorders

Rey (1964) devised a simple 15-item (3 columns × 5 rows) visual memory test to detect faking or exaggeration of memory complaints. To gather normative observations on patients with genuine memory disorders, the authors administered this test to 100 temporal lobe epilepsy inpatients (TLEs) who showed defective performance on at least 1 of 4 standardized memory tests. To determine whether outpatients with neurological disorders (OPs) would produce a distribution of scores similar to those of TLEs, Rey's 3 × 5 was administered to 56 OPs who had been referred for neuropsychological evaluation. Sixteen OPs in litigation were excluded from the outpatient sample because motivation for optimal performance could not be assumed. A Rey's 3 × 5 score of 7 was at or below the 5th percentile of both TLE and OP score distributions. Further, OPs in litigation performed significantly worse on the test than did both TLEs and OPs not in litigation, who did not differ from each other. Results suggest that using a cutoff score of 7 on Rey's 3 × 5 memory test may prove useful in alerting the clinician to possible factitious memory complaints.