This study provides information regarding the validity and reliability of the Wood Prospective Meory Test (WPMT), a newly developed test consisting of three main subscales intended to measure prospective memory. Subjects were 69 college students (50 female, 19 male, age range 18-24), who were administered several memory tasks including the WPMT.The results of this study suggest that the subscales of the WPMT do not have sufficient internal reliability (.50, .60, and .44), and therefore, would be unlikely to correlate highly with any other measures. The usefulness of the WPMT as a clinical instrument is discussed.

The project deals with the testing of SRAM memories using method MBIST with the utilisation of sofware tool Tessent Memory BIST. The main purpose is to get familiar with memory testing and to create a design for testing on a specific chip which after its implementation on the chip will retain the original features and functions. Subsequently, the tool is evaluated on its usability.

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No / The medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system is damaged early in Alzheimer's disease. Cognitive tests designed to help diagnose the disease must detect dysfunction in this system, but must also be insensitive to the cognitive slowing that characterizes normal ageing. On the assumption that the MTL system forms new memories by binding together the many informational aspects of events into units, The Placing Test was designed to index this function by measuring the ability to remember associations between faces and their locations. The influence of normal ageing was minimized by using procedures that compensate for the difficulties in learning and retrieval caused by the cognitive slowing of normal ageing. In two experiments The Placing Test was administered as part of a battery of neuropsychological tests to a group of healthy older people. In both studies, performance in The Placing Test correlated significantly with other measures of memory, but had weaker associations than standard memory measures with other types of cognitive function. The Placing Test appeared not to be biased by age, education or gender, although a larger sample is needed to verify this. A final study examined the performance of 16 patients with suspected Alzheimer's disease. These patients showed clear impairment in The Placing Test, with 81% scoring below the 5th percentile, despite the majority having normal MMSE scores. It is concluded that The Placing Test provides a quick, simple and sensitive measure of memory that has potential to be useful in routine diagnostic investigations for Alzheimer's disease.

Patients with amnestic type of mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) are diagnosed mainly on the basis of performance in verbal memory tests. This thesis deals with the use of a nonverbal test called the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised (BVMT-R) for the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This research compared the performance of patients with clinical diagnosis of MCI (N=79) using the BVMT-R with the performance of these patients using the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), the AVLT being a validated instrument for differentiating aMCI patients from healthy control patients. Both tests follow a similar design paradigm, but they differ in the type of stimuli measured: the BVMT-R tests memory for nonverbal material and the AVLT tests for verbal material. Results showed that there is a moderate correlation between scores (total score, delayed recall score) of the BVMT-R and equivalent scores of the AVLT. Further analyses of performance of MCI patients in both tests (in total scores and delayed recall scores) identified that there was a proportion of patients tested using the BVMT-R with memory impairment that did not show any memory impairment using the AVLT. Our findings indicate a favorable diagnostic potential of BVMT-R in the diagnostics of mild cognitive impairment. Keywords:...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the overgenerality phenomenon and to draw some inferences on possible encoding problems of autobiographical memories (ABMs) in a non-clinically depressed sample. Eighty-eight university students (25 male, 63 female) participated in the experiment using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT / Williams &amp / Broadbent, 1986). The effects of depression level (low or high), cue emotional valences (positive, negative and neutral) and cue number (one or two at each step) on the specificity, overgenerality, and latency of the ABMs recalled were examined. The results showed that the group having high depression scores (Depressed group) was less specific than the group having low depression scores (Non-depressed group) on the specificity levels of the ABMs recalled. Also, the students who were primed with one cue in the AMT were less specific than the students who were primed with two cues simultaneously. The depressed group primed with one cue also recalled less specific ABMs than the non-depressed group primed with two cues / and, the non-depressed group primed with either one cue or two cues in the AMT did not differ in terms of the specificity of the ABMs recalled. Regarding the cue type, the students recalled less specific ABMs as a response to the positive cues than to the neutral cues. However, they did not differ on the specificity of ABMs recalled as a response to the negative and neutral cue words in the AMT. Additionally, the significant interaction between depression level and cue type / cue type and cue number / and, depression level, cue type, and cue number could be summarized with the overall findings that the depressed subjects had the benefit of the two cues priming in the AMT by being more specific on ABMs. For the overgenerality, as a counterpart of the specificity, the results also indicated that the subjects in the depressed group were more overgeneral on the ABM recall than the non-depressed group / and, the simultaneous two cues priming in the AMT had an effect to decrease the overgenerality seen in one cue conditions. The interactions between depression level and cue number, and cue type and cue number on the overgeneral ABM recalls further indicate that the subjects took the benefit of two cues priming with a decrease on overgeneral recall. This benefit of two cues is also seen on the reaction times of specific ABM recalls. Moreover, the subjects reported that they utilized the cues more consecutively than simultaneously and they reported to utilize the first cues more than the second cue when the paired cues were emotional. However, the preference for sequence was almost equal for the neutral-neutral pairs. Supporting the hypotheses of the study, the results suggested that multiple cues in the AMT had an effect to increase the specificity level of the ABMs recalled in the depressed subjects, which was not seen in one-cue conditions. Findings were discussed on the basis of the literature and some proposals were given on the overgenerality of the ABMs by emphasizing the encoding processes.

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The effect of aging on prospective memory was examined. Fifty older subjects and 69 college students were given measures of both retrospective memory and the Wood Prospective Memory Test. It was found that: 1) The reliability of the WPMT subscales was lower than that required for clinical applications; 2) The WPMT subscales correlated significantly with several measures of retrospective memory; 3) There was a tendency for the WPMT subscales to have low, positive but non-significant correlations with the remaining measures of retrospective memory; 4) A self-report questionnaire on prospective memory did not correlate significantly with measures of either prospective or retrospective memory; 5) The older subjects significantly outperformed the younger subjects on the WAISR Vocabulary subtest, but performed significantly more poorly on the WPMT subscales and almost all other measures.

Auditory short-term memory (STM) is important for speech and language development and for learning new information presented auditorily. Research has shown that auditory STM ability is of a developmental nature in the 5 through 8 year age range for a variety of auditory stimuli. Many tests and subtests are available to measure auditory STM ability, however one test, the Auditory Memory Test Battery (AMTB) measures auditory memory span and memory for sequence for 5 types of stimuli. The purpose of this study was to collect normative data on the AMTB scores of normal 9 through 13 year old students and young adults ages 20 through 30 years. The main experimental question was: What are the means and standard deviations of the AMTB scores from samples of normal children 9 through 13 years of age and normal young adults 20 through 30 years of age. A secondary question was: Are the differences between the performance scores statistically significant?