Department of Educational Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA.
School of Social Work, Columbia University, New York City, New York, USA.
Exp Aging Res. 2024 Mar-Apr;50(2):206-224. doi: 10.1080/0361073X.2023.2172949. Epub 2023 Feb 8.
To better understand working memory (WM) deficits in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), we examined information precision and associative binding in WM in 21 participants with MCI, compared to 16 healthy controls, using an item-location delayed reproduction task. WM, along with other executive functions (i.e. Trail Making Task (TMT) and Stroop task), were measured before and after a 2-h nap. The napping manipulation was intended as an exploratory element to this study exploring potential impacts of napping on executive functions.Compared to healthy participants, participants with MCI exhibited inferior performance not only in identifying encoded WM items but also on item-location associative binding and location precision even when only one item was involved. We also found changes on TMT and Stroop tasks in MCI, reflecting inferior attention and inhibitory control. Post-napping performance improved in most of these WM and other executive measures, both in MCI and their healthy peers.Our study shows that associative binding and WM precision can reliably differentiate MCIs from their healthy peers. Additionally, most measures showed no differential effect of group pre- and post-napping. These findings may contribute to better understanding cognitive deficits in MCI therefore improving the diagnosis of MCI.
为了更好地理解轻度认知障碍（MCI）患者的工作记忆（WM）缺陷，我们使用项目-位置延迟再现任务，对 21 名 MCI 患者和 16 名健康对照者的 WM 信息精度和联想绑定进行了研究。在进行 2 小时小睡前后，对 WM 以及其他执行功能（即走迷宫测试（TMT）和斯特鲁普测试）进行了测量。小睡操作是本研究中作为探索性元素，以探索小睡对执行功能的潜在影响。与健康参与者相比，MCI 患者不仅在识别编码 WM 项目方面表现较差，而且在项目-位置联想绑定和位置精度方面表现较差，即使只涉及一个项目也是如此。我们还发现 MCI 患者在 TMT 和斯特鲁普测试中存在变化，反映出注意力和抑制控制能力较差。在小睡后，大多数 WM 和其他执行功能的测量结果在 MCI 患者及其健康同龄人中都有所改善。我们的研究表明，联想绑定和 WM 精度可以可靠地区分 MCI 患者和他们的健康同龄人。此外，大多数测量指标在小睡前后对组间没有差异影响。这些发现可能有助于更好地理解 MCI 中的认知缺陷，从而改善 MCI 的诊断。
