A New Scale for the Evaluation of Proactive and Retroactive Interference in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Objective: The authors evaluated the psychometric properties and clinical utility of the Loewenstein-Acevedo Scale for Semantic Interference and Learning (LASSI-L), in patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) and early Alzheimer's disease (AD). Methods: Subjects were administered Target List A and instructed to remember 15 common words belonging to a specific semantic category, using multi-modal, active encoding procedures. After free recall and cued recall trials of the target list, a second learning trial was offered, followed by a cued recall trial, to facilitate the initial acquisition of targets. Thereafter, the subject was exposed to a semantically-related List B, which was administered in the same manner as Target List A. Test-retest reliability, concurrent and discriminative validity were assessed. LASSI-L measures were then correlated with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) measurements of medial temporal lobe atrophy (MTA). Results: High test-retest, concurrent and discriminative validity was obtained for LASSI-L subscales, and MTA atrophy scores were highly and negatively correlated with LASSI-L indices. Conclusion: Subtests of the LASSI-L demonstrate high reliability and validity, and are strongly associated with MRI biomarkers of early neurodegenerative disease. It is concluded that the LASSI-L is a highly promising test for the assessment of mild cognitive impairment and early AD among the elderly.

The cumulative semantic interference effect in normal and pathological ageing

“…The outcome is also congruent with the inability of MCI individuals to benefit from category-specific semantic cues in memory tasks (e.g., Curiel et al, 2013) and the proactive interference in active learning of list of items (see Loewenstein and Acevedo, 2005;Crocco et al, 2014). This impairment would be characterized by a disruption of the automatic links between semantic representations due to neurodegerative thinning out in the relevant cortical areas (Binder et al, 2009).…”

“…Thus, there are no reasons to predict a stronger cumulative semantic interference effect for the MCI group. Semantic processing (i.e., access to semantic information), however, is impaired in MCI (Curiel et al, 2013;Crocco et al, 2014;Joubert et al, 2010), and thus co-activation of representations of entities semantically similar to the target picture might be absent or limited. If so, MCI should (a) not show cumulative semantic interference effect and (b) show a regular repetition priming effect.…”

A novel cognitive assessment paradigm to detect Pre-mild cognitive impairment ( PreMCI ) and the relationship to biological markers of Alzheimer's disease

“…A unique feature of the LASSl-L is a second presentation of the second target list that taps failure to recover from proactive semantic interference (frPSl). The LASSl-L frPSl measure has been found to be: highly related to total and regional amyloid load in neuropsychologically normal community-dwelling elders (Loewenstein et al, 2016); has differentiated between aMCl patients with suspected AD from cognitively unimpaired elderly controls (CN) (Curiel et al, 2013; Crocco et al, 2014; Matías-Guiu et al, 2016); and has been associated with volumetric loss in AD prone areas among elders with amnestic MCl (Loewenstein et al, 2017b). …”

Semantic Intrusions and Failure to Recover From Semantic Interference in Mild Cognitive Impairment: Relationship to Amyloid and Cortical Thickness

“…A unique aspect of the LASSI-L [unlike current measures of learning and memory], is that it provides a second opportunity to learn the competing List B targets, and performance deficits may reflect a failure to recover from the initial effects of PSI [frPSI]. We have previously shown that performance on the LASSI-L, particularly those vulnerable to frPSI, is highly discriminative between aMCI and cognitively normal groups [7, 9, 24] and is strongly related to loss of volume in several AD-prone brain regions among older adults with aMCI [9]. Gardini and colleagues [28] examined an MCI cohort with deficient performance on various semantic tasks, and found grey matter reductions in the parahippocampus, frontal and cingulate cortices and the amygdala compared to controls with no cognitive impairment.…”

“…Recovery from proactive semantic interference is a feature of the LASSI-L that is not assessed by any existing list-learning measure [4]. Test-retest reliabilities of the LASSI-L have been shown to be high in previous studies, and the accuracy of classification of aMCI patients versus cognitively normal elderly exceeded 90% [7, 24]. …”