Clinical administration and interpretation of the Turkish-adapted Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test: A narrative review and practitioner's guide

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.