title: Evaluating short-term and working memory in older adults: French normative data.
abstract: Short-term and working memory (WM) capacities are subject to change with ageing, both in normal older adults and in patients with degenerative or non-degenerative neurological disease. Few normative data are available for comparisons of short-term and WM capacities in the verbal, spatial and visual domains. To provide researchers and clinicians with a set of standardised tasks that assess short-term and WM using verbal and visuospatial materials, and to present normative data for that set of tasks. The present study compiled normative French data for three short-term memory tasks (verbal, visual and spatial simple span tasks) and two WM tasks (verbal and spatial complex span tasks) obtained from 445 healthy older adults aged between 55 and 85 years. Our data reveal main effects of age, education level and gender on older adults' short-term and WM performances. Equation-based normalisation can therefore be used to take these factors into account. The results provide a set of cut-off scores for five standardised tasks that can be used to determine the presence of short-term or WM impairment in older adults.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Inter-universitaire de Psychologie (LIP-PC2s), Université de Savoie, Chambéry, France. nathalie.fournet@univ-savoie.fr
authors.forename: Nathalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fournet
authors.forename: Jean-Luc
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Roulin
authors.forename: Fanny
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Vallet
authors.forename: Marine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Beaudoin
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Agrigoroaei
authors.forename: Adeline
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Paignon
authors.forename: Cécile
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dantzer
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Desrichard
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D008875:Middle Aged; D012016:Reference Values; D012737:Sex Factors; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis