Protocol for the conceptualization and evaluation of a screening-tool for fitness-to-drive assessment in older people with cognitive impairment.

INTRODUCTION: Due to aging and health status people may be subjected to a decrease of cognitive ability and subsequently also a decline of driving safety. On the other hand there is a lack of valid and economically applicable instruments to assess driving performance. OBJECTIVE: The study is designed to develop a valid screening-tool for fitness-to-drive assessment in older people with cognitive impairment externally validated on the basis of on-road driving performance. METHODS: In a single-centre, non-randomized cross-sectional trial cognitive functioning and on-road-driving-behavior of older drivers will be assessed. Forty participants with cognitive impairment of different etiology and 40 healthy controls will undergo an extensive neuropsychological assessment. Additionally, an on-road driving assessment for external validation of fitness to drive will be carried out. Primary outcome measures will be performance in attention, executive functions and visuospatial tasks that will be validated with respect to performance on the on-road-driving-test. Secondary outcome measures will be sociodemographic, clinical- and driving characteristics to systematically examine their influence on the prediction of driving behavior. DISCUSSION: In clinical practice counselling patients with respect to driving safety is of great relevance. Thus, having valid, reliable, time economical and easily interpretable screening-tools on hand to counsel patients is of great relevance for practitioners. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethics approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. The trial results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and various conferences. TRIAL REGISTRATION: 18-640. Trial registration: German Clinical Trials Register. Registration number: DRKS00023549.

Applying Psycholinguistic Evidence to the Construction of a New Test of Verbal Memory in Late-Life Cognitive Decline: The Auditory Wordlist Learning Test.

The construction of the German Auditory Wordlist Learning Test (AWLT) for the assessment of verbal memory in late-life cognitive decline was guided by psycholinguistic evidence, which indicates that a word's linguistic characteristics influence its probability of being learned and recalled. The AWLT includes four trials of learning, short and long delayed free recall, and a recognition task. Its words were selected with taking into account their semantic content, orthographic length, frequency in the language, and orthographic neighborhood size (the number of words derived by adding, subtracting, or replacing a single letter at a time). Through this method, it was possible to better control item and test difficulty, improve the similarity between parallel forms, and reduce bias through recall advantages for certain words due to their linguistic characteristics. In two pilot studies with cognitively healthy subjects, the AWLT showed good internal consistency, split-half reliability, and parallel forms reliability and proved able to assess learning, retention, and recognition. Overall, linguistic recall effects were mitigated; however, an advantage for high-frequency words was observed.

In the white cube: museum context enhances the valuation and memory of art.

Art museum attendance is rising steadily, unchallenged by online alternatives. However, the psychological value of the real museum experience remains unclear because the experience of art in the museum and other contexts has not been compared. Here we examined the appreciation and memory of an art exhibition when viewed in a museum or as a computer simulated version in the laboratory. In line with the postulates of situated cognition, we show that the experience of art relies on organizing resources present in the environment. Specifically, artworks were found more arousing, positive, interesting and liked more in the museum than in the laboratory. Moreover, participants who saw the exhibition in the museum later recalled more artworks and used spatial layout cues for retrieval. Thus, encountering real art in the museum enhances cognitive and affective processes involved in the appreciation of art and enriches information encoded in long-term memory.

Art in time and space: context modulates the relation between art experience and viewing time.

The experience of art emerges from the interaction of various cognitive and affective processes. The unfolding of these processes in time and their relation with viewing behavior, however, is still poorly understood. Here we examined the effect of context on the relation between the experience of art and viewing time, the most basic indicator of viewing behavior. Two groups of participants viewed an art exhibition in one of two contexts: one in the museum, the other in the laboratory. In both cases viewing time was recorded with a mobile eye tracking system. After freely viewing the exhibition, participants rated each artwork on liking, interest, understanding, and ambiguity scales. Our results show that participants in the museum context liked artworks more, found them more interesting, and viewed them longer than those in the laboratory. Analyses with mixed effects models revealed that aesthetic appreciation (compounding liking and interest), understanding, and ambiguity predicted viewing time for artworks and for their corresponding labels. The effect of aesthetic appreciation and ambiguity on viewing time was modulated by context: Whereas art appreciation tended to predict viewing time better in the laboratory than in museum context, the relation between ambiguity and viewing time was positive in the museum and negative in the laboratory context. Our results suggest that art museums foster an enduring and focused aesthetic experience and demonstrate that context modulates the relation between art experience and viewing behavior.

What makes an art expert? Emotion and evaluation in art appreciation.

Why do some people like negative, or even disgusting and provocative artworks? Art expertise, believed to influence the interplay among cognitive and emotional processing underlying aesthetic experience, could be the answer. We studied how art expertise modulates the effect of positive-and negative-valenced artworks on aesthetic and emotional responses, measured with self-reports and facial electromyography (EMG). Unsurprisingly, emotionally-valenced art evoked coherent valence as well as corrugator supercilii and zygamoticus major activations. However, compared to non-experts, experts showed attenuated reactions, with less extreme valence ratings and corrugator supercilii activations and they liked negative art more. This pattern was also observed for a control set of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures suggesting that art experts show general processing differences for visual stimuli. Thus, much in line with the Kantian notion that an aesthetic stance is emotionally distanced, art experts exhibited a distinct pattern of attenuated emotional responses.