Intelligence and working memory: evidence from administering the WAIS-IV to Italian adults and elderly

The Relative Strengths of Relationships Between Fine Motor Skills, Working Memory, Processing Speed and Fluid Intelligence in Early Elementary School Children

The goal in the present paper was to examine the combined and relative impact of fine motor ability, auditory working memory, and processing speed on fluid intelligence in a sample of early elementary school students. Our participant sample was 145 children (Mage = 9.1 years, SD = 1.1; 80 boys, 65 girls). We used the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices Test as a measure of fluid intelligence and five other measures to represent the three predictor variables: the Grooved Pegboard Test as a measure of fine motor skills, Digit Span Forwards and Digit Span Backwards tests as measures of working memory, and Rapid Automatized Naming and Letter-Digit Substitution tasks as measures of processing speed. Regression analyses indicated that only two of these measures had a statistically significant association with the fluid intelligence test scores, namely, scores on the Grooved Pegboard (fine motor skills) and Digit Span Backwards (working memory) tests, with these two measures explaining 35% of the variance in the fluid intelligence test scores. Thus, fine motor skills and working memory were correlated with fluid intelligence in early elementary-grade students. Until the directions of these relationships are better understood, we might assume that interventions aiming to increase young children's fluid intelligence, or at least their intelligence scores, might partly target working memory and fine motor skills.

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Adults - Fourth Edition profiles of adults with autism spectrum disorder

AIM

In this study, we have compared 229 Wechsler Adults Intelligence Scale - Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) cognitive profiles of different severity adults with autism spectrum disorder to verify the impact of several variables including sex, age, level of education and autism severity level in an Italian sample. Moreover, we wanted to find out the optimal cut points for the major intelligence quotients in order to discriminate autism severity levels.

METHODS

Participants were recruited from two National Health System Center in two different Italian regions and were assessed with gold-standard instruments as a part of their clinical evaluation. According to DSM-5, cognitive domains were also measured with multi-componential tests. We used the Italian adaptation of WAIS-IV. We checked our hypotheses using linear regression models and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves.

RESULTS

Our results showed that age and level of education have a strong impact on Verbal Comprehension (VCI) and Working Memory Indexes (WMI). Gender differences are relevant when considering the VCI and Processing Speed index (PSI) in which women obtained the best performance. These differences are still relevant when considering cut points of ROC because 69 resulted to be the optimal cut point for women, 65 for men.

CONCLUSIONS

Few conclusions can be assumed only examining Full Scale Intelligence Quotient (FSIQ) scores as it includes many different information about broader cognitive abilities. Looking deeper at main indexes and their subtests findings are consistent with previous research on the disorder (moderate correlations of FSIQ, Perceptual Reasoning index, WMI and PSI with the participants' age), while other results are unforeseen (no effect of sex found on FSIQ score) or novel (significant effect of education on VCI and WMI). Using an algorithm predicting optimal cut point for discriminating through autism severity levels can help clinicians to better label and quantify the required help a person may need, a test cannot replace diagnostic and clinical evaluation by experienced clinicians.

Processing speed and working memory are predicted by components of successful aging: a HUNT study

BACKGROUND

Research has demonstrated that cognitive heterogeneity occurs with aging both within and between individuals. The purpose of this study was to explore whether the cognitive heterogeneity in aging was related to the subgroups of successful and usual aging.

METHOD

Participants were a representative sample of normal older adults (n = 65, age range 70-89 years). All subjects had participated in the third phase of the Nord-Trøndelag Health Survey (HUNT3) and completed all subtests in the Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS-III) and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III). Successful aging was defined in four ways in the study: as (1) absence of disease, (2) high functioning, (3) active engagement with life, or (4) all three components combined. Five domains of memory and intelligence functions were investigated using linear regression analysis, with group membership (successful versus usual aging) as predictors and age, sex and education as correlates.

RESULTS

Processing speed performance was correlated with the successful aging component absence of disease, younger age and being of the female sex, while working memory performance was correlated with the successful aging component absence of disease and more years of education. Performance in other domains (verbal, visuospatial, and episodic memory) were not related to any successful aging definition. Age had a consistent negative effect on the processing speed domain for all successful aging definitions. Education was positively linked to cognitive performance on the verbal and working memory domains. Being female was positively linked to processing speed and episodic memory.

CONCLUSIONS

Processing speed and working memory were linked to successful aging when it was defined as absence of disease, but not by other components of successful aging, i.e. domain-specific. In contrast, other cognitive domains were not related to any components of successful aging.

Performance-Based Everyday Problem-Solving in Patients With TBI

OBJECTIVE

The present study examined whether the everyday problems test (EPT), a performance-based measure of everyday problem-solving, can be considered a useful test in assessing functional independence in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The relationship between EPT, cognitive abilities (i.e., selective attention, set switching, and working memory) and self-rated measures of everyday functioning and disability in these patients was also assessed.

METHOD

In this case-control study 25 postcomatose outpatients with TBI (age M = 35.9, SD = 14.21) from a neurorehabilitation unit and 25 matched controls were enrolled. Participants were administered the EPT along with neuropsychological tests of selective attention, set switching and working memory, and self-rated measures of everyday functioning and disability.

RESULTS

Patients with TBI were less accurate and slower than controls in the EPT; the two groups were accurately classified based on EPT completion time (likelihood ratio test χ2 = 28.67, R2 = 0.72, p < .001). In the patient group education and selective attention explained a large portion of variance in EPT accuracy (R2 = 0.53, p = .001), while only selective attention explained a significant portion of variance in EPT time (R2 = 0.24, p < .01). Self-rated measures of everyday functioning and disability did not significantly contribute to EPT performance variance.

CONCLUSION

Including performance-based measures as the EPT in a multifactorial approach to assessment can be useful for unraveling cognitive factors contributing to TBI's impact on everyday functioning. Since attentional processes seem to play a significant role in determining EPT performance, rehabilitation of functional independence should target this ability first.

The Contribution of Executive Functions When Reading Multiple Texts: A Systematic Literature Review

In the present-day knowledge society, people need to critically comprehend information across multiple sources that express diverse and contradictory viewpoints. Due to the complexity associated with this process, an important role can be played by Executive Functions, that is, cognitive control processes used to regulate mental functioning and behavior when automatized elaborations are not sufficient. The aim of this article is to review existing research on the roles of executive functions when reading from multiple texts. To identify the appropriate studies, we conducted a search in the following databases: Web of science, Scopus, PsycInfo, Eric. The search string was created by combining the terms used in past literature reviews on executive functions and multiple-texts comprehension. From the total number of 4,877 records identified, seven articles met all the inclusion criteria and were analyzed. Given the scarcity of studies on the topic, we decided to examine also eight articles reporting indirect evidence about the association between executive functions and multiple-text comprehension. Our review revealed that the study of the association between executive functions and multiple-texts comprehension is underdeveloped. The results seem to suggest that working memory is involved in surface comprehension, whereas results about sourcing and intertextual integration processes are mixed. Indirect evidence suggests that other executive functions, such as planning or monitoring, may be involved when learning from multiple texts. More research on this topic is needed given the increasing complexity of the contexts in which reading activities take place.

Emotional, Psychological, and Cognitive Changes Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy: Is There an Advantage of Being an Older Adult?

Introduction: The study examined age-related differences between young and older adults’ emotional and psychological experience as well as cognitive functioning throughout different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy.

Materials and Methods: Participants were interviewed by phone when confined at home during the national lockdown (T1-May 2020; N = 138 young adults; N = 119 older adults) and after the first wave of contagions, when restrictions were discarded (T2-September 2020; N = 52 young adults; N = 59 older adults). A sub-sample also participated in a third assessment (T3-December 2020). Participants completed questionnaires assessing their emotional and psychological functioning (i.e., positive and negative affect, perceived social and emotional loneliness, resilience) along with memory tasks (Backward Digit Span task and words list recall).

Results: Although individuals reported less positive and more negative emotions during the lockdown than at T2, results showed that older adults displayed overall fewer negative emotions and greater resilience than young adults. The latter were those who reported feeling more emotionally lonely when compared to their older counterpart during the lockdown than afterward. Older adults’ advantage in emotional and psychological functioning was also confirmed 7 months after the national lockdown. Only age-related differences in favor of young adults for the memory tasks were found. The measures of interest were also susceptible to mood and/or concerns of COVID-19 effects.

Discussion: These findings further highlight the age-related advantage of older adults managing the emotional and psychological experience even when facing an unexpected, prolonged, and unpredictable, stressful life event such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moving Toward Accurate Assessment of Working Memory in Adults With Neurogenically Based Communication Disorders

Purpose This article presents a viewpoint highlighting concerns regarding currently available assessments of working memory in adults with neurogenic communication disorders. Additionally, we provide recommendations for improving working memory assessment in this population. Method This viewpoint includes a critique of clinical and experimental working memory tests relevant to speech-language pathologists. We consider the terminology used to describe memory, as well as discuss language demands and test construction. Results Clinical and experimental testing of working memory in adults with neurogenic communication disorders is challenged due to theoretical, methodological, and practical limitations. The major limitations are characterized as linguistic and task demands, presentation and response modality effects, test administration, and scoring parameters. Taking these limitations into consideration, several modifications to working memory testing and their relevance to neurogenic populations are discussed. Conclusions The recommendations provided in this article can better guide clinicians and researchers to advocate for improved tests of working memory in adults with neurogenic communication disorders. Future research should continue to address these concerns and consider our recommendations.

Paying attention to speech: The role of working memory capacity and professional experience

Managing attention in multispeaker environments is a challenging feat that is critical for human performance. However, why some people are better than others in allocating attention appropriately remains highly unknown. Here, we investigated the contribution of two factors-working memory capacity (WMC) and professional experience-to performance on two different types of attention task: selective attention to one speaker and distributed attention among multiple concurrent speakers. We compared performance across three groups: individuals with low (n = 20) and high (n = 25) WMC, and aircraft pilots (n = 24), whose profession poses extremely high demands for both selective and distributed attention to speech. Results suggests that selective attention is highly effective, with good performance maintained under increasingly adverse conditions, whereas performance decreases substantially with the requirement to distribute attention among a larger number of speakers. Importantly, both types of attention benefit from higher WMC, suggesting reliance on some common capacity-limited resources. However, only selective attention was further improved in the pilots, pointing to its flexible and trainable nature, whereas distributed attention seems to suffer from more fixed and severe processing bottlenecks.