Performance on cognitive tasks in predicting the behavioral competences in the institutionalized elderly

Verbal fluency in senile dementia: an analysis of search and knowledge

This investigation concerns the ability to decide on superordinate category membership as a determinant of retrieval failure in fluency tasks. Subjects were 24 normal elderly (mean age 83) and 66 senile dementia patients (mean age 80.5). Two tasks were presented. In the recall task subjects were asked to supply instances of articles of clothing and fruits. In a recognition task subjects were tested for their knowledge of category membership. Normative production frequencies of the items in the recognition task were systematically varied from intermediate to very low. Senile dementia patients generated significantly (P less than 0.001) less instances of both categories than normal elderly. In contrast, recognition of category exemplars was not impaired. These results present direct evidence for the hypothesis that senile dementia patients know far more category instances than they are able to produce.

Construct validation of the Hand Test Withdrawal score on institutionalized older adults

The Hand Test Withdrawal score was correlated with an independent criterion measure of general intactness, the Mental Status Questionnaire, for a sample of 57 "normal," institutionalized, elderly (M age = 77.26 yr.) to establish the construct validity of the Withdrawal score for older adults. A Pearson r of .43 (p < .001) was obtained, suggesting that the Withdrawal score is a valid measure of mental status or general intactness for institutionalized older adults.

Rekitting the Wechsler Paired-Associate Task: the Waterford Index

The Waterford Index provides a new scoring system for the Wechsler paired-associate task. Item performances across successive trials were coded so as to reflect the psychological phenomena of learning, forgetting and item effects (N = 50). The Index describes two rules for differentiating between cases of cognitive impairment and non-impairment. Rule 1 contrasts the respective contributions of learning and forgetting. Rule 2 takes account of cases characterized by a high proportion of correct responses. Against a criterion index based on performances on other psychological tests of organic dysfunction, the Waterford Index yielded higher predictive efficiencies than associated with other Wechsler indices, intelligence, and age.

Intellectual and personality differences between community-living and institutionalized older adult females

The purpose of the present study was to investigate simultaneously differences between normal institutionalized older adults and community-living older adults with respect to intelligence/cognitive test performance and personality. Participants were 25 community-living females (M age = 72.9 yrs, SD = 6.34) and 25 institutionalized females (M age = 80.0 yrs, SD = 6.46). Intellectual/cognitive ability was assessed by the WAIS, Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M), Ravens Coloured Progressive Matrices; personality was assessed by the Hand Test, a projective technique. Several multivariate analyses (discriminant analysis) were conducted. Results suggested that even when controlling for age and level of education, institutionalization appears to be associated with intellectual/cognitive as well as personality deficits. The findings were discussed in terms of the potential implications for the professional working with institutionalized older adults.