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

ABSTRACT:

Background

Cognitive 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.

Methods

Healthy adults (N = 36; 47.3 ± 12.0 years; mean IQ 127.0 ± 14.1; 58% males) completed 7 testing sessions, distributed

SUBMITTER: Bartels C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2955045 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature