Dementia patients' caregivers often provide information about patients' daily functioning, but little is known about factors influencing caregivers' perceptions. Baseline data from an intervention trial were used to compare caregiver estimates of dementia patients' performance with their actual performance of instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) and to assess relationships between measures of caregiver responses to caregiving, self-perceived sense of self-efficacy, and depression. We also assessed patient cognition, overall function and behavioral disturbance, and caregivers' perceptions of their patients' behavior as manipulative or deliberate. Disparities between these estimates and actual patient performance on structured IADL tasks were unrelated to any caregiver, patient, or relationship factor that we measured