Psychology and Neuroscience最新文献

Hispanic individuals are at greater risk for health disparities, less than optimal health care, and are diagnosed at later stages of cognitive impairment than white non-Hispanics. Acculturation and different attitudes toward test-taking may result in decrements in performance, especially on unfamiliar measures that emphasize speed and accuracy. Non-Hispanic individuals often outperform Hispanic individuals on cognitive and neuropsychological measures in community and clinical populations. Current neuropsychological testing may not provide accurate data related to monolingual and bilingual individuals of Hispanic descent. Testing instruments were identified by searching academic databases using combinations of relevant search terms. Neuropsychological instruments were included if they were designed to detect cognitive impairment, had an administration time of less than 45 minutes, and were available in English. Validity studies were required to employ gold standard comparison diagnostic criteria. Twenty-nine instruments were evaluated in dementia staging, global cognition, memory, memory and visual abilities, working memory and attention, verbal learning and memory, recall, language, premorbid intelligence, literacy/cognitive reserve, visuospatial, attention, problem-solving, problem solving and perception, functional assessment, and mood/daily functioning domains. Spanish-language neuropsychological instruments need to be made widely available and existing instruments to be normed in Spanish to best serve and assess diverse populations. Psychometric data were reported for neuropsychological instruments, which may be administered to Hispanic older adults presenting for evaluation related to dementia-spectrum disorders. This is one of the few reviews to provide an overview of the sensitivity and specificity of available Spanish translated neuropsychological instruments.

False memory rates differ in individuals with high versus low cognitive reserve and between young-old and old-old age groups. Here we tested how two types of false memory (false alarms to new items and source memory) in two age groups differed with cognitive reserve. Subjects were presented with words and either instructed to generate a past event from their memory associated with the word or to imagine a future event associated with the word. At test, participants were instructed to determine whether the event was a past, future, or new event. Results showed overall false memory rates were lower for young-old adults and those with high reserve. Critically, low cognitive reserve was most associated with source memory errors in young-old but not old-old adults. Reflecting the opposite pattern, false alarms to new items were most associated with low cognitive reserve for old-old, but not young-old adults. These results seem to suggest two different classes of false memories in old age. That is, cognitive reserve was most protective for familiar lures in earlier stages of old age, whereas it was most protective for new lures in later stages of old age. These results support the idea that retrieval monitoring deteriorates with age, potentially due to declines in working memory capacity, but that the decline may be attenuated by cognitive reserve. Furthermore, we suggest that different levels of working memory capacity may be required for monitoring source memory versus item memory, leading to differential effects of cognitive reserve depending upon age.

Relating information to the self improves memory. However, this self-reference effect (SRE) is typically studied through explicit self-judgments on individual trials. The current study assessed whether a self-referential mode of thought, induced through a writing task, also induced an SRE on a later task. The study also tested the effects of aging on the SRE, given that a long-lasting mnemonic strategy may be especially relevant for this group. Ninety-two younger adults and 60 older adults were assigned to different writing conditions and then completed an unrelated SRE task. Across younger and older adults, the classic SRE effect was observed in the narrative writing condition, reduced in the semantic self-reference condition, and further reduced in the episodic self-reference condition. These results support the induction of a self-referential mode of thought, but this mode does not enhance memory. The classic SRE effect can be reduced after thinking about the self by reflecting on autobiographical memories. Results argue for a single shared self-referential mechanism that can be accessed through self-focused writing or the classic SRE task.