Interplay of Cognitive Efficiency, Cognitive Ability and Motivation

Abstract

The current body of research often focuses on the problem of cognitive decline through ageing. People adapt to these changes of cognitive resources by using brain reserve. An overview of results of different studies on how cognitive abilities of older adults decline highlights high variability of conclusions and sometimes contradiction but it has been shown older adults can be as good as or even better than younger participants in specific domains. Among others, personal meaningfulness of a situation and closeness to the researcher can be strong factors when assessing cognitive abilities and the aim of this paper was to research how these effect cognitive efficiency.In the pilot study we eliminated the factor of laboratory setting and checked how cognitive efficiency and abilities change in relation to motivation. Forty-eight participants, divided into two age groups, were asked to pass a proverb interpretation test. The results showed that participant's subjective view on the researcher, perceived closeness, correlated with the adequacy in proverb interpretation. Both groups scored higher on adequacy of interpretation when they perceived to be close to the researcher. The younger adults outperformed the older but those in the older adults' group, who felt to be close to the researcher scored as well as younger adults who didn't perceived to be close to the researcher. This motivational reserve might play a role in assessing cognitive abilities and pathologies that affect the outcome of neuropsychological tests.

The scope of using pragmatic language tests for early detection of dementia: A systematic review of investigations using figurative language

“…Several other factors, such as age and education, can affect comprehension of figurative forms as well as cognitive performance in general 112 . A recent study 122 on proverb comprehension in a healthy population reported that subjective meaningfulness and closeness with the researcher can modulate test performance. Forty‐eight participants were divided into two age groups.…”

Increasing sensitivity of clinical proverb tests for diagnosis of dementia

“…To develop more sensitive tests of figurative language that could be useful in disentangling typical cognitive aging from preclinical AD, one would need to go beyond frequency, abstractness, and syntactic complexity of these expressions and consider their internal features, as illustrated above by the example from semantic classes of proverbs. Perhaps such tests would challenge recent findings that cognitively healthy elderly people comprehend proverbs as well as young people in certain circumstances, 9 or even better, despite significant atrophy in the relevant brain areas. 10 Whether tests of figurative language will in the future have more clinical applicability in early diagnosis and monitoring of cognitive decline in dementia depends critically on improving their sensitivity, which in the case of proverb tests means taking into consideration their internal features, such as semantic class.…”