Applied Neuropsychology-Adult最新文献

Here we aimed to investigate the rate of forgetting of the familiarity and recollection components of recognition in patients at the onset of medial temporal lobe (MTL) pathology and destined to convert to Alzheimer's disease (AD). For this purpose, we conducted a longitudinal study of 13 patients who were diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) at the first assessment and followed-up for 3 years. During this time, five patients converted to AD and eight remained in a stable condition of cognitive impairment. A group of 15 healthy subjects were enrolled as the control group (HC). In order to separately quantify the contribution of recollection and familiarity to recognition memory performance, the experimental sample was submitted to a modified version of Huppert and Piercy's procedure that included a Remember/Know paradigm. Data demonstrated that both stable and converter a-MCI patients forgot memory traces relative to the familiarity components of recognition at the same rate as HC. Conversely, converter a-MCI patients showed accelerated long-term forgetting specifically for the recollection component of recognition compared to stable a-MCI and HC. This is the first empirical demonstration that familiarity and recollection components of declarative memory are subject to different rates of forgetting in a-MCI patients as a function of their longitudinal clinical outcome. Our finding of accelerated long-term forgetting of the recollection component of recognition disclosed by converter a-MCI patients suggests that atrophy in the MTL not only interferes with the storage aspects but also disrupts the consolidation of memory traces.

While many studies have demonstrated a relationship between depression and cognitive deficits, most have neglected to include measurements of performance validity. This study examined the relationship between depression and cognition after accounting for noncredible performance. Participants were veterans referred for outpatient clinical evaluation. The first set of regression analyses (N = 187) included age, sex, and education in Model 1, Beck Depression Inventory-2 (BDI-2) added in Model 2, and pass/failure of Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) added in Model 3 as predictors of 12 neuropsychological test indices. The second set of analyses (N = 559) mirrored the first but with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) diagnosis in Models 2 and 3. In the first analyses, after including TOMM in the model, only the relationship between BDI-2 and verbal fluency remained significant, but this did not survive a Bonferroni correction. In the second analyses, after including TOMM and Bonferroni correction, MDD diagnosis was a significant predictor only for CVLT-II Short Delay Free Recall. Therefore, the relationship between depression and cognition may not be driven by frank cognitive impairment, but rather by psychological mechanisms, which has implications for addressing depressed individuals' concerns about their cognitive functioning and suggest the value of providing psychoeducation and reassurance.

This paper aims to examine the key factors influencing young drivers' hazard avoidance in Iran. In this study, a hazard avoidance index is defined and calculated for investigating the effect of impulsiveness, behavioral, and psychological characteristics on driving hazard avoidance. A questionnaire and go-no-go and flanker computer tests as well as a driving simulator are used for collecting data from 173 Iranian drivers under the age of 30. For this purpose, different scenarios were used, such as pedestrian crossing, the presence of fixed obstacles, and animals crossing the road, whose various characteristics are also changed. Structural equation modeling and the partial least squares method are applied for investigating the relationship between different variables and the hazard avoidance index. The results show that the driver hazard avoidance index is mostly affected by variables such as inhibitory control, opposite directional response, attentional impulsiveness, motion impulsiveness, non-planning impulsiveness, disregarding the law, and lapses and error. The results could help policymakers to assess diving hazard avoidance and improve training programs related to traffic safety based on the variables that are more effective on inexperienced and novice drivers' hazard avoidance.

Objective: Standardized executive functioning (EF) measures do not reliably capture EF-related difficulties reported in daily life. We aim to determine if an ecologically relevant neuropsychological battery is more strongly associated with self-reported everyday EF impairments than classically used tests.

Method: Fifty-nine adults aged 18-49 self-rated their EF abilities using the Barkley Deficits in EF Scale (BDEFS) and were randomly assigned to complete either a test battery composed of EF measures with hypothesized ecological relevance (Six Elements, Zoo Map, Hayling Sentence Completion, Iowa Gambling, and Auditory Startle Tasks) or one composed of traditional EF tasks (Card Sorting, Trail Making, Color-Word Interference, and Verbal Fluency). Associations were examined using linear regression.

Results: There were no strong associations between BDEFS subscales and performance on either test battery. Only the regression model predicting Emotional Regulation from ecological tasks was significant. Iowa Gambling Task performance and corrugator muscle contraction in the Auditory Startle Task individually contributed significantly to the model, with small and moderate effect sizes respectively.

Conclusion: Results align with evidence that self-reported EF difficulties are not adequately captured by formal neuropsychological measures, even for performance-based measures which directly tap everyday constructs. Findings are interpreted cautiously in the context of a small, high-functioning sample.

ALBA screening instrument (ASI) has been demonstrated to be an effective, cheap, and noninvasive clinical instrument to screen for Lewy body dementia (LBD). We aimed to determine the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of ASI (ASI-T) in patients with LBD and to investigate the discriminative power of the test in patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD), LBD, and cognitively healthy older adults (controls). 172 older adults over 60 years of age (43 with LBD, 41 AD, and 88 controls) were included. The sensitivity and specificity of the instrument were determined. A significant difference was found in ASI-T total score between people with LBD versus the controls (t=-9.259; p < 0.001), and versus patients with AD (t = 3.490; p = 0.001). Internal consistency of the ASI-T was good(Cronbach's alpha = 0.81). The cutoff score of 7 showed sensitivity (86%) and specificity (81%) (AUC= 0.888,CI0.95, p < 0.001) compared to controls. Also, compared to AD, it showed sensitivity (86%) and specificity(70%) (AUC = 0.590,CI .95, p < 0.001). Moreover, ASI-T demonstrated a significant concurrent validity with MMSE (r = -0.62; p < 0.001) and MoCA (r = -0.54; p = 0.003). In factor analysis, the five subscales accounted for 60% of the total variance. Our findings suggested that the ASI-T is a reliable, valid, and effective instrument for screening LBD. With acceptable psychometric properties, it has the power to distinguish patients with LBD from controls or those with AD.

The Response Bias Scale (RBS) is a measure of protocol validity that is composed of items from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - 2. The RBS has been successfully cross-validated as a whole, but the composition of the scale has not been reexamined until recently when three types of items were identified. In this study we sought to examine the reliability of the scale as a whole, as well as the items that are (a) empirically supported and conceptually similar (ES/CS), (b) empirically supported but not conceptually similar (ES/NS), and (c) not empirically supported (NES). Participants included 56 veterans undergoing neuropsychological evaluation for suspected traumatic brain injury. Results generally replicated Ratcliffe et al. finding that removing key NES items improved the internal consistency of the RBS from 0.706 to 0.747. Examined separately, ES/CS and ES/NS had internal consistencies of 0.629 and 0.605, respectively. One of the nine NES items had strong internal consistency, but none of the remaining eight had corrected item-total correlations above 0.194. NES items had an internal consistency of 0.177. Although the RBS is well-validated in detecting non-credible cognitive presentations, it may prove even more valuable after further item refinement whereby items detracting from its reliability and validity are excised.

The Trauma Symptom Inventory-Second Edition (TSI-2) is garnering research interest as a symptom validity test in the evaluation of trauma-related disorders. However, there has been limited empirical validation of its validity scales in clinical and forensic real-world settings. This study evaluated the ability of the TSI-2 Atypical Response (ATR) scale to discriminate response bias in cognitive performance and symptom reporting in a large sample of disability and compensation-seeking claimants. This retrospective chart review included 296 adults with a known history of trauma exposure or claimed trauma-related psychological injury who underwent neuropsychological and/or comprehensive psychological assessment in a private neuropsychology clinic. The discriminability of the ATR scale to classify credible versus non-credible cognitive profiles and symptom reporting were analyzed by AUC-ROCs. Overall, the ATR scale demonstrated poor discriminability of assessment validity based on the Word Memory Test, Victoria Symptom Validity Test, and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form. The ATR scale had fair discriminatory ability of only one of the over-reporting scales (F-r), with an ROC area of .73, p = .001. However, the test publisher's proposed ATR cut-offs of ≥8 for screening, research, and normal groups, and ≥15 in forensic and clinical settings revealed significant issues with sensitivity and specificity. These results suggest that the TSI-2 should be paired with other established performance validity and symptom validity tests in clinical assessments and not be used as the primary or sole indicator of assessment validity.

The intrinsic functional network architecture accounts for task-evoked brain activity changes and variabilities in cognitive performance. Relationships between the intrinsic functional network architecture and task performance or learning ability have been previously reported. However, the relationships between learning benefits and the characteristics of intrinsic functional network architecture for different types of learning methods remain unclear. In this study, we used graph theoretical analysis to examine the relationships between intrinsic functional network connectivity and learning benefits in two well-known learning methods in the field of cognitive rehabilitation-errorless learning (EL learning) and trial-and-error learning (T&E learning). We focused on the default mode network (DMN) as a task-relevant network, which can differentiate between EL and T&E learning and was found to be more important for T&E learning in a previous study. Participants performed a color-name association task with both learning methods. The graph metrics used were within-network connectivity and efficiency for the DMN. Within-DMN connectivity and DMN efficiency showed a significantly weak positive correlation with T&E scores but not with EL scores. These findings show that the intrinsic integration strength within the DMN relates to individuals' learnability through the T&E method.