A dynamic investigation of cognitive dedifferentiation with control for retest: evidence from the Swiss Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on the Oldest Old.

Empirical examinations of the hypothesis of dedifferentiation of cognitive abilities in old and very old age (a) do not account for possible retest effects, which consequently may yield biased estimates of age effects, and (b) focus on time-independent relations (e.g., number of latent constructs, correlations between latent or measured variables). The authors applied a structural equation model with statistical control for retest effects to investigate the dynamic relations between a marker of perceptual speed (cross out) and a marker of verbal fluency (category-fruits). Longitudinal data are from 5 waves of the Swiss Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on the Oldest Old (N = 377, baseline age range = 79.5- 84.5 years). The authors found that, independently of retest effects, performance on the cross-out task affected changes in performance on the category task while the opposite did not hold true. This analytical technique could be applied to various markers of broad fluid-mechanic and broad crystallized-pragmatic components of cognition.