Practice effects in healthy adults: A longitudinal study on frequent repetitive cognitive testing

BMC Neuroscience

Research Article

Hannelore Ehrenreich¹  Martin Wegrzyn¹  Verena Ackermann¹  Anne Wiedl¹  Claudia Bartels¹ 

[1] Division of Clinical Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, Göttingen, Germany;

关键词: Executive Function;    Cognitive Test;    Cognitive Domain;    Practice Effect;    Neuropsychological Test Battery;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2202-11-118

 received in 2010-06-11, accepted in 2010-09-16,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundCognitive deterioration is a core symptom of many neuropsychiatric disorders and target of increasing significance for novel treatment strategies. Hence, its reliable capture in long-term follow-up studies is prerequisite for recording the natural course of diseases and for estimating potential benefits of therapeutic interventions. Since repeated neuropsychological testing is required for respective longitudinal study designs, occurrence, time pattern and magnitude of practice effects on cognition have to be understood first under healthy good-performance conditions to enable design optimization and result interpretation in disease trials.MethodsHealthy adults (N = 36; 47.3 ± 12.0 years; mean IQ 127.0 ± 14.1; 58% males) completed 7 testing sessions, distributed asymmetrically from high to low frequency, over 1 year (baseline, weeks 2-3, 6, 9, months 3, 6, 12). The neuropsychological test battery covered 6 major cognitive domains by several well-established tests each.ResultsMost tests exhibited a similar pattern upon repetition: (1) Clinically relevant practice effects during high-frequency testing until month 3 (Cohen's d 0.36-1.19), most pronounced early on, and (2) a performance plateau thereafter upon low-frequency testing. Few tests were non-susceptible to practice or limited by ceiling effects. Influence of confounding variables (age, IQ, personality) was minor.ConclusionsPractice effects are prominent particularly in the early phase of high-frequency repetitive cognitive testing of healthy well-performing subjects. An optimal combination and timing of tests, as extractable from this study, will aid in controlling their impact. Moreover, normative data for serial testing may now be collected to assess normal learning curves as important comparative readout of pathological cognitive processes.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Bartels et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010