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P1‐494: The Reliability and validation of the short cued recall test
Author(s) -
Youn Jong Chul,
Park Eun Hee,
Jung Chan Seung,
Lee So Ae
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.05.776
Subject(s) - dementia , multivariate analysis of variance , receiver operating characteristic , recall , psychology , neuropsychology , neuropsychological test , psychometrics , reliability (semiconductor) , neuropsychological assessment , audiology , multivariate analysis , test (biology) , clinical psychology , cognition , medicine , psychiatry , statistics , cognitive psychology , disease , mathematics , paleontology , power (physics) , physics , quantum mechanics , biology
the visual variant of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It involves a selective visual impairment in contrast to relatively spared language and memory functions, with reading difficulties tending to be one of the first manifestations of the disease. Patients with PCA frequently cite reading problems as being particularly debilitating, and studies on reading ability in PCA cases have identified a range of dyslexias including ‘pure’ alexia, attentional dyslexia, neglect dyslexia, apperceptive alexia and spatial alexia. The aim of this investigation is to clarify patterns of reading deficits in individuals with PCA and to identify how such deficits relate to dysfunction in other parts of the visual system. Methods: The participants recruited for this study were 20 individuals with PCA, 20 patients with typical AD and 20 age-matched controls. Single-word reading (N 1⁄4 196) tasks examined the effects of font, word length, size, spacing, case and letter confusability on accuracy and latency. Participants also completed 6 tests of letter processing under conditions of temporal masking, visual crowding and contrast sensitivity. Results: Preliminary results from 4 participants show a significant effect of font size on reading accuracy, with larger font words counterintuitively being read less accurately than smaller words (mean 22.9% vs 54.2%, p<.05). Word spacing also had a significant impact upon reading accuracy, with words with spaced letters being named correctly less often than unspaced words (mean 34.9% vs 59.9%, p<.05). Case, word length, and confusability had no significant effect of reading performance. A full set of results is expected to be collected by 04/2011. Conclusions: Preliminary findings confirm the heterogeneity, severity and atypical nature of reading problems in individuals with PCA. Problems with reading large print words confirm a common yet surprising clinical complaint of finding large text, such as newspaper headlines, harder to read than small print, and may reflect a progressive attentional restriction in the effective field of vision. We hope that further results will shed light on the role of other factors in determining reading accuracy, which in turn might inform the design of reading strategies and remedial techniques.