USING A REVERSE VISUALLY GUIDED REACHING TASK TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN HEALTHY AGING AND EARLY ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

Changes in motor behavior may function as a proxy for cognitive decline. While Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) is associated with impairments in learning and memory, recent studies suggest that subtle changes in motor task performance may reflect early cognitive changes. For example, the visuomotor rotation task that manipulates visual feedback about hand position during reaching movements, can be used to examine cognitive changes in aging populations. The current study used the reverse visually guided reaching task (rVGR) which rotates visual feedback of participant’s hand position 180⁰ relative to the actual hand position. We sought to expand on previous literature by recruiting cognitively impaired individuals to characterize changes in rVGR performance in early AD. We also examined learning curves to assess the impact of cognitive impairment on learning in the rVGR task and probed the cognitive correlates of rVGR performance with a neuropsychological battery. We recruited young adults, and older adults (55 – 85 years old) with and without cognitive impairment to complete a VGR task with veridical mapping, and then the rVGR task. Overall, cognitively impaired adults exhibited longer reaction times and performed more corrective movements. Age differences were observed for nearly all overall measures of performance. The largest differences between healthy older adults and cognitively impaired adults were identified in the earliest stages of the learning curve. In the first few movements, the cognitively impaired group made more angular errors. Both overall- and early- measures of performance were correlated with measures of cognitive control. These findings add to the growing literature suggesting that sensorimotor adaptation tasks may be sensitive to early cognitive changes in AD

Exploring How Environmental-Musical Context Change Affects Long-Term Memory

Previous research indicates that music can act as an environment in which a context-dependance can be observed. Orchestral music by Tchaikovsky was used to provide a context for a free recall task. Participants were randomly assigned to music or silent for study and for test. They studied 20 words, performed a 4-minute distraction task, and then were asked to recall the studied words. The results did not provide evidence that music acts as a context-dependent factor, but it did provide some support for a positive disruption effect. The study-silent/test-silent group performed significantly worse than the music-present groups. The evidence seems to suggest that when music is present during either study or test, but not both, memory benefits