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PubMed2004

Detecting poor effort and malingering with an expanded version of the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLTX): validation with clinical samples.

Three studies describe the development and validation of a new procedure (AVLTX) to detect inadequate effort or malingering by adding 60-min delayed recall/recognition trials and identifying "impaired" memory performances that are highly inconsistent with performances of brain-damaged (BD) individuals. In Study I, AVLTX performances of 25 probable malingerers (PMs) were compared with those of 43BD and 40 psychiatric patients (PSYs). Seven inconsistencies were identified and converted to scaled inconsistency scores, yielding the exaggeration index (EI). Study II reported cross-validation in an independent sample of 34 PM, 70BD and 89 PSY, showing sensitivity of 0.59 and specificities of 0.97 (BD) and 0.92 (PSY). Study III compared the diagnostic accuracy of the EI with two well-established effort assessment paradigms, exemplified by the RMTand DRT (a symptom validity test). The RMT showed excellent sensitivity and poor specificity; the DRT showed poor sensitivity and excellent specificity; the EI showed good sensitivity and excellent specificity. Adding a second delayed trial to list-learning tests can be a time-efficient procedure to detect inadequate effort.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Right hemisphere mediation of verbal learning and memory in acquired right hemisphere speech dominant patients.

Forty-eight patients with temporal lobe epilepsy completed measures of narrative recall and list learning prior to surgery. The intracarotid amytal procedure (IAP) established that 13 patients were right hemisphere dominant for speech and 35 (18 left foci, 17 right foci) were left hemisphere dominant. Hippocampal volumetric neuron densities were measured after surgery. The left hippocampal neuron densities in subfields CA3 and the hilar area were significantly correlated with list learning ability and percent retention for narrative recall only for left hemisphere speech dominant patients with left seizure foci. No significant correlations between measures of neuron volume and memory were found for the left hemisphere speech dominant patients with right seizure foci or the right hemisphere speech dominant patients with left seizure foci. This suggests that the right hemisphere of right speech dominant patients mediates verbal memory as well as speech. This conclusion is supported by patterns of correlations among measures of verbal memory that differed for patients undergoing resection of the dominant hemisphere versus those undergoing resection of the nondominant hemisphere. However, it is premature to conclude that the cerebral organization of cognitive functions of right hemisphere speech dominant patients is equivalent albeit reversed from that of left hemisphere speech dominant patients. Right hemisphere speech dominant patients with left temporal foci differed from left hemisphere speech dominant patients with right temporal foci with respect to the patterns of correlations between measures of verbal memory and intelligence as well as the level of intellectual ability that they demonstrated.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Verbal learning and memory deficits in traumatic brain injury: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval.

The present study examined the nature of verbal memory deficits in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) compared to healthy controls. The study was designed to control for methodological shortcomings of previous related research. Three groups of participants were used: (a) a head injured sample with moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries (N=55), (b) a control sample matched on age and initial performance on CVLT Trial 5 and Sum of Trials 1 to 5 (N=55), and (c) a control sample matched on age, education, and race, but not on initial CVLT learning performance (N=55). Current findings indicate that: (a) rate of learning was comparable across groups, consistent with no encoding differences, (b) TBI patients have a significantly more rapid rate of forgetting of new information than either acquisition-matched or demographic-matched controls, consistent with consolidation problems in TBI, (c) TBI patients have less proactive interference than demographic-matched control participants, consistent with a consolidation problem in the TBI group, (d) TBI patients and acquisition-matched controls have comparably low rates of proactive interference, consistent with impaired acquisition in both of these groups, and (e) TBI patients and controls do not differ in the benefit experienced from semantic or recognition retrieval cues, consistent with no differences in retrieval processes. These data support an impaired consolidation hypothesis, rather than encoding or retrieval deficits, as the primary deficit underlying memory impairment in TBI.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Performance of four age groups of normal elderly on the Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test.

This study explored effect of age on encoding, retention, and retrieval components of memory functioning in a sample of 156 healthy, elderly subjects between the ages of 57 and 85, partitioned into four age groups. Memory assessment was based on subjects' performance on the RAVLT, which consisted of five free-recall trials, recall after interference, and recognition trial. Significant group differences in recall were found on all five learning trials, whereas rates of learning, forgetting, and recognition did not differ for four age groups. In addition, primacy/recency effect was equally strong for all groups. Results suggest faulty retrieval mechanisms, whereas encoding and retention processes did not prove to be affected by aging.

Aged↗
PubMed2006

Verbal learning and aging: combined effects of irrelevant speech, interstimulus interval, and education.

Older or lower educated individuals may be less able than younger or higher educated individuals to inhibit irrelevant speech when learning new visual information. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects of age (four groups), educational attainment (low or high), and verbal noise (spoken words or silence) on word-learning performance in 230 individuals aged 24 to 76 years. Performance was negatively affected by age, lower education, and irrelevant speech, but there were no interactions between age group and noise condition. In Experiment 2, we increased the difficulty of the word-learning task by using both irrelevant speech and a short interstimulus interval (2 or 0.5 s). Age differences became more pronounced as the result of the simultaneous occurrence of irrelevant speech and a short interstimulus interval. This suggests that older individuals may need more time than younger individuals to learn new information in noisy environments.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Verbal learning strategies in Parkinson's disease.

Word-list learning was studied in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and normal control (NC) participants by means of the selective-reminding procedure of H. Buschke and P. A. Fuld (1974) in 3 learning conditions using semantically unrelated items; semantically related items, whose implicit categorical structure had to be spontaneously guessed; and semantically related items, whose explicit categorical structure was known in advance. The PD patients displayed poor learning in all 3 conditions. To identify the functional locus of the PD patients' deficits, the authors performed a stochastic Markov chain analysis, which allowed individual measurements of encoding, retrieval, and category clustering abilities. PD patients were never significantly impaired in encoding word engrams; their impairment was confined to automatic and intentional retrieval and to the ability to benefit from explicit semantic clues.

Aged↗
PubMed2000

Elderly norms for the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-Revised.

The present study evaluates the effects of age, education, and gender in a representative sample of older adults and provides normative data for community-dwelling elderly. Age and gender had significant effects on HVLT-R performance. We provide age- and gender-adjusted normative data. Surprisingly, education level did not affect HVLT-R performance, indicating that education-adjusted norms are not necessary for this measure within this age range. We evaluated a subsample of subjects census-matched on age, education, and gender. These subjects did not differ in overall performance from our entire sample. Therefore, the normative data provided in this paper can be considered to be census-comparable for age, education, and gender.

Aged↗
PubMed2002

Re-examination of a Rey auditory verbal learning test/Rey complex figure discriminant function to detect suspect effort.

Bernard (1990), and Bernard, Houston, and Natoli (1993) identified a discriminant function, derived from Rey figure recall score and RAVLT trial 1 and recognition, which discriminated simulators and controls with 77--85% accuracy. However, in the current study, application of the discriminant function to patients with suspect effort, brain injured patients, and controls, revealed excellent sensitivity (95%) but low specificity (33% for patients, 61% for controls). A new discriminant function using the same Rey figure and RAVLT scores, derived from actual patients with documented suspect effort and patients with confirmed brain injury, resulted in an overall classification of 85% correct, with only 16% of suspect effort and 15% of brain injured patients misidentified. Use of a discriminant function score of </=-.40 resulted in sensitivity of 71% while maintaining specificity of >/=91%.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Use of elaborative encoding to facilitate verbal learning after adolescent traumatic brain injury.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effectiveness of elaborative encoding in learning and remembering word definitions after traumatic brain injury (TBI). DESIGN: Two case studies. SETTING: University outpatient clinic. PARTICIPANTS: Two adolescents with severe memory impairments after TBI who needed specific vocabulary for school. INTERVENTIONS: A series of individual speech-language therapy sessions incorporating clinician- and subject-generated strategies to facilitate elaborative encoding. Target words were based on school requirements and pretreatment test results and were assigned randomly to treatment or control groups. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Accuracy of free-recalled definitions at the conclusion of therapy and after 1 month with no therapy. RESULTS: Significant improvement in expressed word knowledge at the conclusion of therapy, with improvement on treated words maintained at 1 month for both subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Elaborative encoding was an effective tool for teaching specific information required for school. Patterns of response differed substantially from those of normally developing children. Generalization to classroom use was planned for and should be measured in future research.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed2003

A computational model of prefrontal control in free recall: strategic memory use in the California Verbal Learning Task.

Several decades of research into the function of the frontal lobes in brain-damaged patients, and more recently in intact individuals using function brain imaging, has delineated the complex executive functions of the frontal cortex. And yet, the mechanisms by which the brain achieves these functions remain poorly understood. Here, we present a computational model of the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in controlled memory use that may help to shed light on the mechanisms underlying one aspect of frontal control: the development and deployment of recall strategies. The model accounts for interactions between the PFC and medial temporal lobe in strategic memory use. The PFC self-organizes its own mnemonic codes using internally derived performance measures. These mnemonic codes serve as retrieval cues by biasing retrieval in the medial temporal lobe memory system. We present data from three simulation experiments that demonstrate strategic encoding and retrieval in the free recall of categorized lists of words. Experiment 1 compares the performance of the model with two control networks to evaluate the contribution of various components of the model. Experiment 2 compares the performance of normal and frontally lesioned models to data from several studies using frontally intact and frontally lesioned individuals, as well as normal, healthy individuals under conditions of divided attention. Experiment 3 compares the model's performance on the recall of blocked and unblocked categorized lists of words to data from Stuss et al. (1994) for individuals with control and frontal lobe lesions. Overall, our model captures a number of aspects of human performance on free recall tasks: an increase in total words recalled and in semantic clustering scores across trials, superiority on blocked lists of related items compared to unblocked lists of related items, and similar patterns of performance across trials in the normal and frontally lesioned models, with poorer overall performance of the lesioned models on all measures. The model also has a number of shortcomings, in light of which we suggest extensions to the model that would enable more sophisticated forms of strategic control.

Brain Injuries↗
PubMed2006

Non-verbal learning is impaired in very mild Alzheimer's disease (CDR 0.5): normative data from the learning version of the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a transitional state between normal aging and dementia. Although there have been some studies on the role of verbal memory in learning ability, there have been no reports on the part played by visual memory. In the present study, the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test (RCFT) was given to healthy subjects and to those with MCI to determine if visual memory was maintained in these two groups. Additionally, normative data from the learning version of the RCFT for Japanese subjects were examined, for purpose of reference. The participants consisted of 381 clinical dementia rating (CDR) 0 subjects and 137 CDR 0.5 subjects who could perform the full set of RCFT tasks. The CDR 0 group had significantly higher scores than the CDR 0.5 group in all trials. The CDR 0 participants also showed a significant step-by-step learning effect, while the CDR 0.5 participants did not show a significant learning effect. These results suggest that the CDR 0 participants maintained intact learning abilities of encoding and retrieval, while the CDR 0.5 participants did not do so; but further studies will be needed to clarify these findings.

Aged↗
PubMed1993

Verbal learning differences in epileptic patients with left and right temporal lobe foci--a pharmacologically induced phenomenon?

A total of 27 patients with medically intractable complex partial seizures has been investigated for effects of anticonvulsant drugs on mental abilities, particularly on verbal memory performance. Fourteen patients with right (RTLE) and 13 with left (LTLE) temporal lobe epilepsy have been tested with a word list learning paradigm under the conditions of full and reduced anticonvulsant medication. Memory performance has significantly improved with drug reduction, however only for the LTLE group. In addition, significant group differences for verbal memory between LTLE and RTLE subjects under full medication have completely disappeared with drug reduction. Finally this investigation demonstrates, that very specific and circumscribed steps of verbal memory processing, particularly retrieval abilities after interference, are affected by anticonvulsants. These findings underline the importance of pharmacological effects on cognition and suggest to reevaluate their relevance compared to other contributing factors.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Lexicalization of idioms in urban fifth graders: a reaction time study.

Idioms are an important aspect of language that comprises a sizeable portion of our vocabulary. However, lexical access research has largely been limited to understanding how literal words are accessed and processed in the mental lexicon. Adult data show that idioms are quickly accessed from the lexicon and are likely processed as long words [J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav. 18 (1979) 523]. The purpose of this study was to examine lexicalization of idioms in a group of school-aged children. Using a phrase classification design, this research tested the Lexical Representation Hypothesis [J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav. 18 (1979) 523] in 19 urban fifth graders (5 boys, 14 girls; M age=10.16 years). On a computer, the students classified 54 phrases, including 24 idioms (high, moderate, and low familiarity [J. Speech Hear. Res. 36 (1993) 728]), 24 grammatical control word strings and 6 unrelated foils as either idioms or nonidioms. The idioms were identified with 62% accuracy. Unexpectedly, the boys tended to show higher rates of accuracy than the girls. Response latencies were shorter on the idioms compared to the controls and high familiarity idioms were processed faster than moderate and low familiarity idioms. These findings provide developmental data for lexicalization of idioms and the relationship between lexicalization and familiarity. At the cocnlusion of this articel, the reader will be able to: (1). discuss the various theories of idiom access and processing, (2). discuss how lexical access relates to idiom knowledge in school-aged children, and (3). consider the association between lexical access and familiarity relative to idiom comprehension in school-aged children.

Child↗
PubMed1999

Performance of 225 Dutch school children on Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT): parallel test-retest reliabilities with an interval of 3 months and normative data.

Performance on Dutch adaptations of Rey's AVLT was examined in a sample of 225 6- to 12-year-old Dutch school children, selected to be representative of the general population. With an interval of 3 months, they were tested twice, using two out of three test forms which proved to be parallel. No test-retest practice effects were apparent. Age had a considerable impact on test performance. Measured imperfectly, socioeconomic background and intellectual level had some additional influence, as did the examiner who administered the tests. Boys made more errors than girls. Normative data corresponded well with those collected in a smaller Australian sample, suggesting usefulness outside The Netherlands. With a parallel test-retest reliability of.70, which was reduced to.59 when the influence of age was taken into account, the most reliable AVLT measure was the total number of words correctly recalled over the five learning trials. On the basis of reliability data, implications for the clinical use of the AVLT are discussed.

Journal Article↗