Assessing Error Awareness as a Mediator of the Relationship between Subjective Concerns and Cognitive Performance in Older Adults.
OBJECTIVE
Subjective concerns of cognitive decline (SCD) often manifest in older adults who exhibit objectively normal cognitive functioning. This subjective-objective discrepancy is counter-intuitive when mounting evidence suggests that subjective concerns relate to future clinical progression to Alzheimer's disease, and so possess the potential to be a sensitive early behavioural marker of disease. In the current study, we aimed to determine whether individual variability in conscious awareness of errors in daily life might mediate this subjective-objective relationship.


METHODS
67 cognitively-normal older adults underwent cognitive, SCD and mood tests, and an error awareness task.


RESULTS
Poorer error awareness was not found to mediate a relationship between SCD and objective performance. Furthermore, non-clinical levels of depressive symptomatology were a primary driving factor of SCD and error awareness, and significantly mediated a relationship between the two.


CONCLUSIONS
We were unable to show that poorer error awareness mediates SCD and cognitive performance in older adults. Our study does suggest, however, that underlying depressive symptoms influence both poorer error awareness and greater SCD severity. Error awareness is thus not recommended as a proxy for SCD, as reduced levels of error awareness do not seem to be reflected by greater SCD.
Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Melbourne, Australia.|Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.|Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Rachel F
RF
Buckley
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Gemma
G
Laming
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Li Peng Evelyn
LP
Chen
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Alice
A
Crole
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Robert
R
Hester
D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000368:Aged; D001364:Awareness; D003071:Cognition; D060825:Cognitive Dysfunction / Q000175:diagnosis*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D057566:Self Report