Resistiveness to care (RTC) is common in older adults with dementia. RTC disrupts nursing care, increasing costs of care by 30%. Elderspeak (infantilizing communication used by nursing staff) may trigger RTC in individuals with dementia. Videotaped care episodes (N=80) of nursing home residents with dementia (N=20) were coded for type of staff communication (normal talk and elderspeak) and subsequent resident behavior (cooperative or RTC). Bayesian statistical analysis tested relationships between staff communication and subsequent resident RTC. The probability of RTC varied significantly with communication (Bayes p = .0082). An increased probability of RTC occurred with elderspeak (.55, CrI = .44 -.66), compared to normal talk (.26, CrI = .12-.44). Communication training has been shown to reduce elderspeak and may reduce RTC in future research.

Young and older adults provided language samples in response to questions while walking, finger tapping, and ignoring speech or noise. The language samples were scored on 3 dimensions: fluency, complexity, and content. The hypothesis that working memory limitations affect speech production by older adults was tested by comparing baseline samples with those produced while the participants were performing the concurrent tasks. There were baseline differences: Older adults' speech was less fluent and less complex than young adults' speech. Young adults adopted a different strategy in response to the dual-task demands than older adults: They reduced sentence length and grammatical complexity. In contrast, older adults shifted to a reduced speech rate in the dual-task conditions.

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A brief intervention can improve communication and reduce RTC, providing an effective nonpharmacological intervention to manage behavior and improve the quality of dementia care. No adverse events occurred.

A digital pursuit rotor task was used to measure dual task costs of language production by young and older adults. After training on the pursuit rotor, participants were asked to track the moving target while providing a language sample. When simultaneously engaged, young adults experienced greater dual task costs to tracking, fluency, and grammatical complexity than older adults. Older adults were able to preserve their tracking performance by speaking more slowly. Individual differences in working memory, processing speed, and Stroop interference affected vulnerability to dual task costs. These results demonstrate the utility of using a digital pursuit rotor to study the effects of aging and dual task demands on language production and confirm prior findings that young and older adults use different strategies to accommodate to dual task demands. Keywords Language production; dual task demandsThe use of concurrent tasks to study the allocation of attention and/or working memory has a rich history in psychology and neuropsychology (Baddeley, 1986;Baddeley, Lewis, Eldridge, & Thompson, 1984;Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & Anderson, 1996;Rosen & Engle, 1997). The study of dual task costs has become a central concern in cognitive aging research for both practical and theoretical reasons. Dual task costs may disrupt and impair the performance of older adults are watching television while responding to conversational inquiries (Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002), driving a car while talking on the telephone (Strayer & Johnson, 2001), or ambulating round their environment in the company of others (Li, Lindenberger, Freund, & Baltes, 2001). Dual task costs have been linked theoretically to impairments of executive function (Baddeley, 1996), arising from deficits in time-sharing between the two tasks, costs of switching between tasks, failures to update task-specific cognitive representation, or a breakdown in the inhibition of automatic responses (Salthouse, Atkinson, Berish, 2003).Previous studies have examined the "penetration" of cognitive and attentional tasks by the simultaneous performance of motor tasks such as walking or other tasks such as word memorization (Lajoie, Teasdale, Bard & Fleury, 1996;Lindenberger, Marsiske, & Baltes;Li, et al., 2001;Maylor & Wing, 1996; Maylor, Allison, & Wing, 2001;Melzer, Menjuya, & Kaplanski, 2001; Teasdale, Bard, LeRue, & Fleury, 1993; Verghese, Buschke, Viola, et al., 2002). These studies of dual task costs confirm a link between cognition and sensory-motor Correspondence should be addressed to Susan Kemper, Gerontology Center, 3090 DHDC, 1000 Sunnyside Ave., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045 or E-mail: SKEMPER@KU.EDU. Preliminary reports of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, in November, 2006 and submitted by the 2 nd author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a M. A. in Psychology from the University of Kansas. (Lindenberger et al., 2000; Welford, 1958) and suggest that motor tasks such a...