Selective reminding in normal and demented aged people: auditory verbal versus visual spatial task.
A new test of visual spatial learning (VS) which uses the rationale of selective reminding and evaluates memory and learning of spatial positions of objects was presented. This was compared with the auditory verbal selective reminding (AV) in regard to normal aging and dementia. The results showed that the performance of VS declines with age more steeply than those of AV. Factor analyses showed that the performance of VS to be factorially independent of that of AV, and showed that VS can account for most of the decline in performance of normal aged people. The performance on VS of demented patients correlated well with the serverity of dementia. The comparison between multi-infarct dementia and Alzheimer type dementia indicated that severe impairment of VS with relative preservation of AV is a distinctive pattern of Alzheimer type. These results suggest that VS is a useful tool to evaluate memory decline with aging and that it can be useful in the clinical diagnosis of dementia.
D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D003704:Dementia / Q000523:psychology*; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D011581:Psychological Tests; D013037:Spatial Behavior; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology