Objectives Projections from the United States Census Bureau suggest that the African American population may be the fastest growing race over the next 30 years and that they may be at the highest risk for developing dementia later in life. Various social factors have been shown to be associated with cognitive function and health outcomes. The present study aims to evaluate the relationship between social engagement and cognitive decline in a cohort of older African American adults. Methods We utilized multilevel modeling to examine the association between cognitive decline and social engagement in a sample of 617 older African American adults. Results Social activity was associated with global cognition, perceptual speed, perceptual orientation, and episodic memory over time. Loneliness was associated with better semantic memory performance over time. Perceived discrimination was associated with better semantic memory performance over time. Larger social network was associated with worse perceptual speed scores over time. Conclusions Although our findings on loneliness and perceived discrimination over time were inconsistent with prior research, our findings on social activity and social network size over time were consistent with past literature and are thought to be due to positive social interactions providing a catalyst for cognitively stimulating activities. These results suggest that interventions designed to preserve cognition in African American older adults should incorporate adequate social activity. Furthermore, to maximize effectiveness, interventions should not necessarily focus on just expanding one's social network.

Everyday function is compromised by mild cognitive changes in aging. These changes predict risk for future decline and dementia but remain poorly characterized, largely due to a scarcity of sensitive, objective measures.Twenty-seven younger adults and 25 non-demented older adults completed the Naturalistic Action Test (NAT), a performance-based measure of everyday action involving simple and complex tasks. Performance was coded for overt errors and subtle inefficiencies. Participants also completed self-report functional measures and cognitive tests. Mixed ANOVAs revealed that older adults made more subtle NAT errors with high task demands; groups did not differ in overt errors. Correlations did not reveal significant relations between self-report and NAT errors, but NAT performance was correlated with learning and recall.The NAT provides a promising tool for detecting subtle age-related changes and examining decline across levels of impairment. Self-report may lack sensitivity to subtle changes, and episodic memory changes underlie early functional disruption.

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Objective: The purpose of the present study was to further investigate the clinical utility of individual and composite indicators within the CPT-3 as embedded validity indicators (EVIs) given the discrepant findings of previous investigations. Methods: A total of 201 adults undergoing psychoeducational evaluation for ADHD and/or Specific Learning Disorder (SLD) were divided into credible ( n = 159) and non-credible ( n = 42) groups based on five criterion measures. Results: Receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC) revealed that 5/9 individual indicators and 2/4 composite indicators met minimally acceptable classification accuracy of ≥0.70 (AUC = 0.43–0.78). Individual (0.16–0.45) and composite indicators (0.23–0.35) demonstrated low sensitivity when using cutoffs that maintained specificity ≥90%. Conclusion: Given the lack of stability across studies, further research is needed before recommending any specific cutoff be used in clinical practice with individuals seeking psychoeducational assessment.

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