Investigation of Screening Tools for Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (a-MCI)
Seline Ozer, University of Leeds
Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) is defined as cognitive decline,
particularly in memory, greater than that expected for an individual’s age and
education level, but that does not interfere notably with activities of daily life
(Gauthier et al., 2006). There is evidence that people with a-MCI are more likely to
develop dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease (Petersen et al., 2001). There is
increasing clinical and research interest in patients with a-MCI as they have been
identified as being at a potentially critical time point for intervention to prevent or
slow their decline into dementia.
A big practical problem with carrying out research in this population is that a-MCI is
difficult to recognise and diagnose. The current internationally accepted standard
for the diagnosis of a-MCI is the Petersen criteria (Petersen 2004). However, these
criteria comprise a complex, and specialist-based procedure that is time consuming.
Shorter, less arduous cognitive screening procedures would provide a more resource
efficient and feasible method for researchers to identify people with probable a-MCI
from large, community-based populations.
The present study aims to investigate the clinical utility and effectiveness of two brief
candidate screening tools (the Memory Alteration Test (M@T) and the Test Your
Memory (TYM) test) for identifying people with probable a-MCI in a communitydwelling population. My poster will cover the background to this study, methods
used and data collected so far.
Lie or Mistake? Dear and Hearing Children’s Understanding of Beliefs and
Intentions
Ciara Kelly, University of Sheffield
Understanding the beliefs and intentions behind what people say is critical to
understanding. For example, determining if a false statement is a lie or a mistake
depends on our assessment of the speaker’s awareness that the statement is false.
Deaf children from hearing families are significantly delayed in their ability to pass
false belief tasks compared to hearing peers and deaf children from deaf families
(Meristo et at., 2012; Woolfe et al, 2002). We investigated children’s ability to
identify false statements as either a lie of mistake. Children were presented with a
scenario where one protagonist had seen that some food was unfit to eat whereas
another had not. Both uttered a false statement to a third that the food was
unacceptable to eat. All children passed control questions, demonstrating that they
had understood the scenario and remembered who had seen what. However,
hearing children and deaf of deaf children significantly outperformed the deaf of
hearing group in their ability to correctly identify the lie and mistake. Since deaf of
hearing children demonstrate delay in language acquisition, it is often argued that
access to language plays a key role in social-cognitive development. The deaf of
hearing children were therefore matched to hearing children with the same language
age, revealing no significant difference in ability to detect lies and mistakes. Findings
suggest that access to language is key to explaining why deaf children from hearing
families have difficulty inferring communicative intentions based on reasoning about
the mental states that underpin speech acts.