Thompson Claire L, Henry Julie D, Rendell Peter G, Withall Adrienne, Kochan Nicole A, Sachdev Perminder, Brodaty Henry
a School of Psychology , The Cairnmillar Institute , Camberwell , VIC , Australia .
b School of Psychology , The University of Queensland , St Lucia , QLD , Australia.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2017 Dec;39(10):941-953. doi: 10.1080/13803395.2017.1281382. Epub 2017 Feb 1.
Prospective memory (PM) is crucial to the maintenance of functional independence in late adulthood and is consistently impaired in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). There remains a need for brief but valid measures of this construct that can be used as part of a comprehensive clinical assessment of cognition. Since the distinctiveness of PM cues is argued to determine the degree of strategic, controlled demands of PM paradigms, two variants of a brief measure were developed, one of which presented low-salience and the other high-salience PM cues.
A large cohort of older adults with normal cognition or MCI was assessed with one of the two variants of our brief, novel measure of PM. Participants were asked to remember to execute PM tasks where the target cue was either high or low in salience, while concurrently engaged in an ongoing task of olfactory assessment.
The task was able to discriminate between groups of participants with MCI or no cognitive impairment, albeit with a small effect size. The high-salience cue improved performance on the PM task; however, there was no interaction of cue salience with group.
These results suggest that the temporal reliability and construct validity of very brief measures of the type used in this study need further exploration to determine their potential to provide meaningful insights into PM function. This measure may have utility as a brief screening tool, with identified deficits being followed up with a more comprehensive PM assessment.
前瞻性记忆（PM）对于老年人维持功能独立性至关重要，且在轻度认知障碍（MCI）中持续受损。仍需要简短而有效的该结构测量方法，可将其用作认知综合临床评估的一部分。由于PM线索的独特性被认为决定了PM范式的策略性、控制性需求程度，因此开发了一种简短测量方法的两种变体，其中一种呈现低显著性PM线索，另一种呈现高显著性PM线索。
一大群认知正常或患有MCI的老年人用我们简短、新颖的PM测量方法的两种变体之一进行评估。参与者被要求记住执行PM任务，其中目标线索的显著性要么高要么低，同时参与嗅觉评估的持续任务。
该任务能够区分患有MCI或无认知障碍的参与者组，尽管效应量较小。高显著性线索提高了PM任务的表现；然而，线索显著性与组之间没有交互作用。
这些结果表明，本研究中使用的此类非常简短测量方法的时间可靠性和结构效度需要进一步探索，以确定它们为PM功能提供有意义见解的潜力。该测量方法可能作为一种简短筛查工具有用，已确定的缺陷可通过更全面的PM评估进行跟进。
