Symposia 14 Program Schedule
02/17/2024
09:00 am - 10:30 am
Room: West Side Ballroom - Salon 1
Symposia 14: Advances in cognitive screening and neuropsychological assessment of cognitive decline and dementia in individuals with low education/low literacy levels
Simposium #4
Developing neuropsychological tests for individuals who are illiterate – the issue of ecological relevance
T. Rune Nielsen, University of Copenhagen, and Danish Dementia Research Center, Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark
Category: Assessment/Psychometrics/Methods (Adult)
Keyword 1: academic skills
Keyword 2: aging (normal)
Keyword 3: neuropsychological assessment
Objective:
A significant impact of illiteracy has been found on numerous neuropsychological tests within a wide range of cognitive domains, which has generally been proposed to reflect differences in learning opportunities of the specific abilities tested, as well as lacking familiarity with test materials and procedures. This talk will present recent attempts to develop more suitable neuropsychological tests for individuals who are illiterate and without formal education.
Participants and Methods:
Performances on measures from the European Cross-Cultural Neuropsychological Test Battery, which was specifically developed to circumvent educational test bias, will be compared between illiterate and literate older adult Turkish immigrants in Denmark. Also, the results will be discussed in relation to international literature, including studies on various types of object memory tests.
Results:
While illiteracy is consistently associated with poorer performance on measures that include any form of school-based procedures, various types of object memory tests and other measures that simulate real-life activities and have ecological relevance are relatively unaffected by illiteracy.
Conclusions:
It can be extremely difficult to interpret test results from individuals who are illiterate and without formal education as they are likely to perform like individuals with focal cerebral lesions or dementia on conventional neuropsychological tests. The issue of ecological relevance in the context of illiteracy may be key to identifying and circumventing educational test bias when developing neuropsychological tests for individuals who are illiterate.
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