The present study explored the role of self-referencing on false alarm rates among people with mild cognitive impairment suggestive of the early signs of the Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiologic process (MCI–AD). Given that people with MCI–AD demonstrate higher rates of false alarms and that false alarms have been shown to increase for self-relevant information, it was predicted that people with MCI–AD would experience a disproportionate increase in memory errors for highly self-related information. Method: Patients with a diagnosis of MCI–AD (n = 23) and healthy control participants (n = 27) rated words for self-descriptiveness or commonness and completed a surprise recognition test. Results: Contrary to expectations, results indicated that people with MCI–AD were at no greater risk for false alarms than were control participants as a function of self-descriptiveness, relative to a control condition. Despite the MCI–ADs’ greater bias to say “yes” in the self condition, increasing self-descriptiveness did not lead to higher false alarm rates and did not impair performance in the self condition relative to commonness judgments. Conclusions: Therefore, although people with MCI–AD may be more susceptible to memory errors, they are at no greater risk of self-related errors than healthy control participants.
