Depressive Symptoms are Associated with Decline Over Time in Verbal Fluency Performance in Female but Not Male Community-Dwelling Older Adults.

OBJECTIVE: The current study was designed to examine associations between depressive symptoms and longitudinal declines in category and letter fluency performance in a gender-stratified sample of older adults. METHOD: Participants were community-residing older adults (females: n = 289; males: n = 233) followed annually (2011-2018) as part of a cohort study conducted at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). Standard forms assessed category and letter fluency performance. Participants were dementia-free during study enrollment. RESULTS: The presence of baseline depressive symptoms suggestive of subclinical depression was associated with a worse longitudinal decline in category fluency performance in female but not male participants. These associations remained significant when excluding participants with prevalent and incident mild cognitive impairment and incident dementia. Irrespective of gender, letter fluency performance did not decline over time and was not influenced by the presence of depressive symptoms. DISCUSSION: The present study's results can aid in identification of older adults who may be at greater risk for cognitive decline, and add to the limited literature examining the influence of gender on longitudinal associations between depressive symptoms and verbal fluency performance.

Effects on Memory of Early Testing and Accuracy Assessment for Central and Contextual Content.

Memory for an event is influenced by many factors including retention interval, frequency of assessment, and type of information assessed concerning the event. We examined the usefulness of observer memory for contextual information in assessing accuracy of memory for central information. Participants viewed a video of a purse being stolen and were asked questions concerning the perpetrator and surrounding context of the event, including where and when the event occurred and who else was present. Participants tested immediately after seeing the video exhibited better memory than those tested for the first time 48-hour after the event. Additionally, testing immediately after viewing the video reduced forgetting over the 48-hour delay (i.e., early testing attenuated subsequent forgetting). Moreover, memory for the context of the event correlated positively with memory of the central information (i.e., perpetrator), and memory concerning other people at the event tended to have the highest correlation with perpetrator memory.

Associative structure of second-order conditioning in humans.

Second-order conditioning (SOC; i.e., conditioned responding to S2 as a result of S1-US pairings followed by S2-S1 pairings) is generally explained by either a direct S2→US association or by an associative chain (i.e., S2→S1→US). Previous research found that differences in responses to S2 after S1 was extinguished often depended on the nature of the S2-S1 pairings (i.e., sequential or simultaneous). In two experiments with human participants, we examined the possibility that such differences result from S1 evoking S2 during extinction of S1 following simultaneous but not sequential S2-S1 pairings. This evocation of S2 by S1 following simultaneous pairings may have paired the evoked representation of S2 with absence of the outcome, thereby facilitating mediated extinction of S2. Using sequential S2-S1 pairings, both Experiments 1 and 2 failed to support this account of how extinction of S1 reduced responding to S2. Experiment 1 found that extinguishing S1 reduced responding to S2, while extinguishing S2 had little effect on responses to S1, although forward evocation of S1 during extinction of S2 paired the evoked representation of S1 with absence of the outcome. In Experiment 2, evocation of S2 during S1 nonreinforced trials was prevented because S2-S1 pairings followed (rather than proceeded) S1-alone exposures. Nevertheless, responding to S2 at test mimicked S1 responding. Responding to S2 was high in the context in which S1 had been reinforced and low in the context in which S1 had been nonreinforced. Collectively, these experiments provide additional support for the associative-chain account of SOC.