Contribution of Pastimes and Testing Strategies to the Performance of Healthy Volunteers on Cognitive Tests

Abstract

Clinicians routinely query factors known to impact cognitive test scores, including age and education. However, without data delineating the impact of less-frequently tracked variables, clinicians are limited to educated inferences about their effect. We explored the relationship of demographics, pastimes, and strategies with cognitive scores in a sample of 499 healthy young volunteers. As expected, age, education, ethnicity, and native language were strongly associated with most tests, while gender and dysphoria were associated with only some. Interestingly, pastimes such as playing number games and word games, and doing activities similar to the tests, were strongly associated with many measures, and testing strategies with almost all. Importantly, at least an additional 50% of the variation in Digit Span Backward and Animals scores was explained by adding covariates about pastimes and strategies to demographic covariates. These results support the utility of querying these elements.

Individual Variation in Contagious Yawning Susceptibility Is Highly Stable and Largely Unexplained by Empathy or Other Known Factors

“…Participants (n  =  328) were enrolled as part of the Duke Genetics of Cognition and Other Normal Variation study [29], [30]. All volunteers were included in the study, but the cohort was enriched for young university students due to our location (mean age  =  32.0, range 18–83, standard deviation  =  15.7).…”

“…All participants took a brief battery of standardized, well-known cognitive tests assessing diverse areas of cognition [29], [30]_ENREF_31. As previously described, principal component analysis was performed on the participants' scores to determine their overall performance.…”

“…All participants took an extensive demographic survey that asked them for information including ethnicity and education[30]; participants also took the questionnaires described below.…”

Positive Neuropsychology

“…Even in patients with cognitive complaints but objectively normal cognition, training in strategy use may build confi dence and a perception of better cognitive performance. In a related vein, compensatory strategy use assessment has been found to improve the ability to predict executive function in daily life (Chaytor et al, 2006 ) and account for a signifi cant amount of variance in neuropsychological performance (Cirulli et al, 2011 ).…”