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Comparing individual differences in inconsistency and plasticity as predictors of cognitive function in older adults.

ABSTRACT: Recent theorizing differentiates key constraints on cognition, including one's current range of processing efficiency (i.e., flexibility or inconsistency) as well as the capacity to expand flexibility over time (i.e., plasticity). The present study uses intensive assessment of response time data to examine the interplay between markers of intraindividual variability (inconsistency) and gains across biweekly retest sessions (plasticity) in relation to age-related cognitive function.Participants included 304 adults (aged 64 to 92 years: M = 74.02, SD = 5.95) from Project MIND, a longitudinal burst design study assessing performance across micro and macro intervals (response latency trials, weekly bursts, annual retests). For two reaction time (RT) measures (choice RT and one-back choice RT), baseline measures of RT inconsistency (intraindividual standard deviation, ISD, across trials at the first testing session) and plasticity (within-person performance gains in average RT across the 5 biweekly burst sessions) were computed and were then employed in linear mixed models as predictors of individual differences in cognitive function and longitudinal (6-year) rates of cognitive change.Independent of chronological age and years of education, higher RT inconsistency was associated uniformly with poorer cognitive function at baseline and with increased cognitive decline for measures of episodic memory and crystallized verbal ability. In contrast, predictive associations for plasticity were more modest for baseline cognitive function and were absent for 6-year cognitive change.These findings underscore the potential utility of response times for articulating inconsistency and plasticity as dynamic predictors of cognitive function in older adults.

SUBMITTER: Grand JH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5026388 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Comparing individual differences in inconsistency and plasticity as predictors of cognitive function in older adults.

Grand Jacob H G JH Stawski Robert S RS MacDonald Stuart W S SW

Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology 20160222 5

<h4>Introduction</h4>Recent theorizing differentiates key constraints on cognition, including one's current range of processing efficiency (i.e., flexibility or inconsistency) as well as the capacity to expand flexibility over time (i.e., plasticity). The present study uses intensive assessment of response time data to examine the interplay between markers of intraindividual variability (inconsistency) and gains across biweekly retest sessions (plasticity) in relation to age-related cognitive fu ...[more]

PMID: 26898536

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Project description:This study was designed to address individual differences in aided speech understanding among a relatively large group of older adults. The group of older adults consisted of 98 adults (50 female and 48 male) ranging in age from 60 to 86 (mean = 69.2). Hearing loss was typical for this age group and about 90% had not worn hearing aids. All subjects completed a battery of tests, including cognitive (6 measures), psychophysical (17 measures), and speech-understanding (9 measures), as well as the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing (SSQ) self-report scale. Most of the speech-understanding measures made use of competing speech and the non-speech psychophysical measures were designed to tap phenomena thought to be relevant for the perception of speech in competing speech (e.g., stream segregation, modulation-detection interference). All measures of speech understanding were administered with spectral shaping applied to the speech stimuli to fully restore audibility through at least 4000 Hz. The measures used were demonstrated to be reliable in older adults and, when compared to a reference group of 28 young normal-hearing adults, age-group differences were observed on many of the measures. Principal-components factor analysis was applied successfully to reduce the number of independent and dependent (speech understanding) measures for a multiple-regression analysis. Doing so yielded one global cognitive-processing factor and five non-speech psychoacoustic factors (hearing loss, dichotic signal detection, multi-burst masking, stream segregation, and modulation detection) as potential predictors. To this set of six potential predictor variables were added subject age, Environmental Sound Identification (ESI), and performance on the text-recognition-threshold (TRT) task (a visual analog of interrupted speech recognition). These variables were used to successfully predict one global aided speech-understanding factor, accounting for about 60% of the variance.

Dataset Information

Comparing individual differences in inconsistency and plasticity as predictors of cognitive function in older adults.

Publications

Comparing individual differences in inconsistency and plasticity as predictors of cognitive function in older adults.

Similar Datasets

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