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PubMed2003

Use of an external mnemonic to augment the efficacy of an internal mnemonic in older adults.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the impact of external memory devices on the efficacy of a package of internal mnemonic techniques. Participants wrote two types of lists during the study phase: (a) a list of study words and/or (b) a loci list. At recall, participants were not allowed to refer to either of the lists they had written during the study. DESIGN: 2 x 2 factorial with writing study words ("write" or "not write") and writing down a previously established loci list ("write" or "not write") manipulated as between-participants variables. PARTICIPANTS: 68 community-dwelling adults 55 years of age and older who wished to improve their memory. MEASUREMENTS: Free word recall. RESULTS: There were statistically significant effects of writing the loci list, but not of writing the list of study words. Scores were higher when participants wrote the loci lists compared to when they did not. CONCLUSIONS: Use of external mnemonics may enhance the efficacy of internal mnemonics, even when the external mnemonic is not used at the time of recall.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed2006

Education effects on cognitive function in a healthy aged Arab population.

BACKGROUND: The Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE) has not been validated in Arabic speaking populations. The Brookdale Cognitive Screening Test (BCST) has been developed for use in low schooling populations. We investigated the influence of gender, education and occupation in a cognitively normal community sample which was assessed using an Arabic translation of the MMSE and the BCST. METHODS: Cognitively normal subjects (n=266, 59.4% males, mean age (SD): 72.4 (5.5) years) from an Arab community in northern Israel (Wadi Ara) were evaluated. Education was categorized into levels: 1=0-4 years, 2=5-8 years, 3=9-12 years. Effects of gender, education and occupation on MMSE and BCST were analyzed by ANOVA, taking age as a covariate. RESULTS: The mean MMSE score of males [26.3 (4.1)] was higher than that of females [23.6 (4.2) points]. Two-way ANOVA showed a significant interaction between gender and education on MMSE (p=0.0017) and BCST scores (p=0.0002). The effect of gender on MMSE and BCST was significant in education level 1 (p<0.0001, both tests) and level 2 (p<0.05, both tests). For education level 1, MMSE and BCST scores were higher for males, while both scores were higher for females in education level 2. The effect of occupation was not significant for both genders. CONCLUSION: Education and gender influence performance when using the Arabic translation of the MMSE and BCST in cognitively normal elderly. Cognitively normal females with 0-4 years of education scored lower than males. These results should be taken into consideration in the daily use of these instruments in Arabic.

Aged↗
PubMed1995

Reflections on cultural influences on aging and old-age suicide in Germany.

The limited attention paid to old-age suicide in Germany is likely related to society's lack of interest in the specific problems of old people. This is despite the fact that over half of all German suicides are committed by persons 65 and older. In reviewing what is known about elderly suicide based on retrospective studies, I submit that suicide in later life is not always based on pathologic mental processes. There may be a number of risk factors unique to elderly suicides, in addition to depressive disorders that involve broader cultural issues among the many motives likely present in any one suicide. Today's emphasis on individualized values may lead to a feeling of meaninglessness in the suicidal elderly. The uncertainty and fear of the inability to influence their own dying a certain weariness of life are also likely unique risk factors for the elderly. Thus the reasons or motives for a suicide may be best considered by understanding the entire life situation and the biographical aspects of the person. Prevention of elderly suicides requires a number of approaches ranging from social assistance and improved training of care providers to more acceptance and valuing of older persons by society.

Aged↗
PubMed1998

When does Huntington's disease begin?

Recent studies have detected basal ganglia atrophy in clinically asymptomatic persons with the genetic mutation that causes Huntington's disease (HD). Whether reductions in caudate and putamen volume on MRI scans are associated with changes in cognitive and neurologic functioning was examined in 13 healthy adults with the IT-15 mutation. Reduced striatal volume was found to correlate with greater neurologic (largely motor) impairment, slower mental processing speed, and poorer verbal learning, although none of the participants met even liberal criteria for clinical diagnosis of HD. These correlations are strikingly similar to those observed in symptomatic HD patients, possibly reflecting the earliest manifestations of disease.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Memory impairment in Parkinson's disease.

A total of 52 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), 11 with presumptive Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 20 healthy subjects were studied; subjects were aged 55-74 years. Neurological symptoms were assessed quantitatively, and the state of higher mental processes were evaluated using the Luriya method. A number of memory tests were also used. These studies showed that PD was almost always accompanied by memory impairment exceeding the age norm. The major mechanism for memory impairment in PD without dementia was inadequate independent organization of memory-related activity at the memorizing and retrieval stages. In PD with dementia, there was also a primary impairment. Differences in memory impairments were found in PD with dementia (deeper derangements of involuntary memory and of information processing during memorizing). Impairments of consolidation of traces were more dependent on the age at onset of PD, while inadequacy of independent organization of memory-related activity was more dependent on disease duration. Most memory parameters in PD correlated with the severity of disturbances in gait and postural reflexes. It is suggested that memory impairment in PD is a manifestation of the major pathological process, which shows a number of differences from other neurogeriatric diseases.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Compelled attention: the effects of viewing trauma-related stimuli on concurrent task performance in posttraumatic stress disorder.

We examined the ability of Vietnam veterans with PTSD to focus attention on a primary digit detection task while concurrently viewing neutral or Vietnam-related picture and word distractors. Controlling for combat exposure, military service, and psychopathology, veterans with PTSD took longer to detect the target when Vietnam-related pictures were distractors. There were no reaction time differences when word stimuli were distractors. The latency effect was specific to trials with trauma-related pictures and did not spread to neutral trials interleaved within a mixed block of trauma and neutral pictures. Individuals with PTSD recalled proportionally more Vietnam-related words than other groups, implying differential attention to Vietnam-related words. Attending to trauma-related pictures interferes with performance of a concurrent task by individuals with PTSD.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Development of beliefs about the origins and controllability of dreams.

In three studies the authors investigated the development of beliefs about dreaming. Study 1 assessed 3- to 5-year-old children's beliefs about the origins and controllability of dreams. Results revealed significant changes in children's beliefs about the roles of behavioral experiences and mental processes in the generation of dream content. Results also revealed that young children consider both dreams and imagination to be highly controllable. In Study 2, preschool-age children, elementary school-age children, and adults received either imagination or dream stories and were questioned about controllability. In Study 3, emotional valence of the dream content was varied. Results of Studies 2 and 3 revealed significant development in beliefs that dreams are not subject to conscious control. Beliefs in controllability were higher among females. Study 3 showed that the emotional content of a dream affects these claims.

Child↗
PubMed1992

Who was Morton Prince?

Morton Prince, a Boston neurologist, founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906 as an outlet especially for those who took a psychogenic view of neurotic disorders. Through experiments with hypnotism, he added appreciably to knowledge of subconscious and coconscious mental processes; The Dissociation of a Personality (Prince, 1905) still ranks as a classic. He early saw that studying normal people in the depth and detail with which one studied patients could make significant contributions to our whole understanding of human nature. Before his death he established and briefly directed the Harvard Psychological Clinic, devising the research environment out of which presently sprang major contributions to the study of personality.

History, 19th Century↗
PubMed2001

Switching between simple cognitive tasks: the interaction of top-down and bottom-up factors.

How do top-down factors (e.g., task expectancy) and bottom-up factors (e.g., task recency) interact to produce an overall level of task readiness? This question was addressed by factorially manipulating task expectancy and task repetition in a task-switching paradigm. The effects of expectancy and repetition on response time tended to interact underadditively, but only because the traditional binary task-repetition variable lumps together all switch trials, ignoring variation in task lag. When the task-recency variable was scaled continuously, all 4 experiments instead showed additivity between expectancy and recency. The results indicated that expectancy and recency influence different stages of mental processing. One specific possibility (the configuration-execution model) is that task expectancy affects the time required to configure upcoming central operations, whereas task recency affects the time required to actually execute those central operations.

Cognition↗
PubMed1981

Effects of a secondary task on the accuracy of single aiming movements.

Recently, Schmidt, Zelaznik, and Frank and Schmidt, Zelaznik, Hawkins, Frank, and Quinn have demonstrated that in rapid, single aiming movements, variability in the movement's kinetic requirements resulted in variability in the movement's amplitude. This new explanation of the speed-accuracy trade-off in motor control, however, does not predict or explain inaccuracy for slower movements (greater than 200 msec). In the two experiments reported, we demonstrate that the Schmidt et al. model can predict variability in slow aiming movements if attention is occupied with an additional task. Subjects were required to perform single aiming movements in either 500 (Experiment 1) or 200 (Experiment 2) msec. In both experiments, the movement amplitude (30, 45, 60, and 75 cm in Experiment 1, and 10, 20, and 30 cm in Experiment 2) and the probability of an auditory probe-reaction time (RT) task were manipulated. Results indicated that only when the movement time (MT) was 500 msec did the probe-RT task change the relationship between the effective target width and the movement's average velocity. This result extended the scope of the Schmidt et al. model to movements with a duration greater than 200 msec. In addition, it seems as though slow movements are controlled by attention-demanding mental processes.

Attention↗
PubMed1992

Relational properties and memory-based category construction.

Although many experiments have investigated factors that constrain perceptual category construction, there have been no investigations of factors that constrain memory-based (MB) category construction. Six experiments examined the extent to which perceptual and MB sorting were influenced by correlated dimensions, family resemblance principles, and conceptual knowledge. Sensitivity to many types of relational information (e.g., correlated features, causal relations, interactive properties of objects, and family resemblance relations) was observed with perceptual sorting, but these properties were rarely used to organize information in MB sorting conditions. Instead, there was a clear preference to organize categories around single dimensions. Even when perfectly correlated features were causally related, Ss in memory conditions did not use correlations to construct categories. The strengths and limitations of MB analyses and categorizations are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Stress grouping improves performance on an immediate serial list recall task.

Five experiments investigated whether perceptual patterning afforded by imposing a recurrent stress pattern on auditorially presented lists has a positive effect on list recall. The experiments also addressed whether the recall advantage reflected the salience that the stress pattern created for certain items or whether the recall advantage arose from the distinct grouping configurations that were produced by the stress pattern. The authors explored these issues by examining immediate serial-recall performance for spoken lists that either did or did not have a stress pattern imposed on them. Lists had an anapest or dactylic stress pattern or were monotone and consisted of two stimulus types, either digit names or common English nouns. Results showed that stress patterns enhanced serial-recall performance and that the recall benefit derived primarily from the perceptual grouping afforded by the stress patterns. Results also showed that the grouping benefit derived from stress patterning generalizes to monotone lists. In contrast, salience effects are attached to the stimulus per se and do not transfer.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The irrelevant sound effect: does speech play a special role?

Memory for order is markedly impaired by the presence of irrelevant sound, even though participants are instructed to ignore the sound. Although a great deal of research has disclosed some features of the task and of the sound that augment or reduce the degree of interference, one important issue of the irrelevant sound effect not yet resolved is whether speech has a special status. This study revealed, within a design of adequate power, that the same physical stimulus (sine wave speech), whether perceived as speech or as nonspeech sound, produces similar degrees of disruption and is less disruptive of serial recall than natural speech. This outcome suggests that the acoustic constituents of sound rather than its source are most influential in determining the impact of irrelevant material.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Repetition priming in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease: a review of findings and theories.

On repetition priming tasks, memory is measured indirectly as a change in performance due to recent experience. It is often functionally and neurally dissociated from performance on explicit memory tasks, which directly measure conscious recall or recognition of recent events. Repetition priming has therefore been extensively studied in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease, which feature mild to severe changes in explicit memory. Initial studies indicated that repetition priming was immune to the effects of aging and greatly reduced in Alzheimer's disease (AD). As more studies have been performed, however, these initial conclusions appear less clear than before and, in the case of AD, actually misleading. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive review of this rapidly expanding literature, articulate the issues that are critical to interpreting the empirical results, and discuss what new conclusions are suggested by the overall pattern of findings.

Aged↗
PubMed1992

Age and the availability of inferences.

Age differences in inference availability and memory were investigated using a speeded decision procedure and cued recall. Younger and older adults read passages that directly suggested either a target inference or an incorrect, competing inference before finally supporting the target inference. At critical points in a passage, subjects judged whether each of a series of words, including either the target or competing inference, was consistent with their current interpretation. Although both groups agreed on the final target inference, younger and older adults showed different patterns of inference availability and revision. Older adults showed broader and more sustained activation of alternative interpretations and also showed lower levels of inference recall. These findings are interpretable by a framework that proposes age-related breakdowns in inhibitory mechanisms that control the contents of working memory (Hasher & Zacks, 1988).

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

When expertise reduces age differences in performance.

The authors examined whether aviation expertise reduces age differences in a laboratory task that was similar to routine air traffic control (ATC) communication. In Experiment 1, older and younger pilots and nonpilots read typical ATC messages (e.g., commands to change aircraft heading). After each message, they read back (repeated) the commands, which is a routine ATC procedure requiring short-term memory. Ss also performed less domain-relevant tasks. Expertise eliminated age differences in repeating heading commands, but did not reduce age differences for the less relevant tasks. In Experiment 2, expertise reduced but did not eliminate age differences in repeating heading commands from spoken messages. The results suggest that expertise compensates age declines in resources when the task is highly domain relevant.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Memory for facts, source, and context: can frontal lobe dysfunction explain age-related differences?

Age-related differences in memory for facts, source, and contextual details were examined in healthy young (18-35 years old) and old (65-80 years old) volunteers. In all tested memory functions, decline over time was greater in the elderly than in the young. A time-dependent increase in the prevalence of source amnesia errors was clearly associated with old age. Contrary to several recent reports, measures of frontal lobe functions did not predict source memory. Nevertheless, some of these putative frontal function measures were related to memory for contextual details. The number of perseverative responses on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test was inversely related to performance on both factual and contextual memory tests, but the association with contextual memory was stronger. Difficulties with response selection on a Stroop task predicted poor contextual memory in young but not in old adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Developmental sex differences in verbal learning.

Although sex differences in verbal learning and memory have been reported in adults, much less is known about when these sex differences emerge and how they develop. In this study, 401 boys and 410 girls between the ages of 5 and 16 years were administered the California Verbal Learning Test--Children's Version. Sex differences were found at all age levels. Girls performed better than boys on all of the immediate and delayed recall trials and on the delayed recognition trial. Girls were also more likely than boys to use a semantic clustering strategy and displayed more effective long-term memory mechanisms. Boys made more intrusion errors and displayed greater vulnerability to interference between the 2 test lists. Because boys had higher mean scores on Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Revised Vocabulary, the observed female superiority in verbal learning could not be attributed to sex differences in overall word knowledge.

Adolescent↗