Gender differences in the serial position among older adults

ABSTRACT

Introduction

There are gender disparities in age of diagnosis with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia, which may be related to general female advantages in verbal memory across aging. Further examination of the serial position effect (SPE) may provide an avenue for earlier diagnosis of MCI/dementia among women.

Method

338 cognitively healthy adults aged 50⁺ (110 men; 228 women) were administered the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) List Learning task as part of dementia screening. We examined whether the SPE could be demonstrated on Trial 1 and delayed recall, and whether SPE patterns were consistent across genders, using mixed measure ANOVAs. Using regression, we also examined whether gender, SPE components, or their interactions predicted RBANS Delayed Memory Index (DMI) performance. Using cluster analyses, we identified a group with reduced primacy relative to recency on Trial 1 and a group without. We used ANOVA to examine whether clusters differed in DMI scores and whether this was moderated by gender.

Results

We demonstrated the prototypical SPE on Trial 1. On delayed recall, we found reduced recency compared to primacy and middle performance. As expected, men exhibited worse performance on the DMI. However, gender did not interact with SPE. Primacy and middle, but not recency, performance on Trial 1 predicted DMI scores, as did the recency ratio. These relationships were not moderated by gender. Finally, participants with better primacy than recency on Trial 1 (N = 187) exhibited higher performance on DMI than participants with better recency than primacy (N = 151). Gender did not interact with cluster membership.

Conclusion

Our results have important clinical implications in assessment, where focusing on Trial 1 primacy performance and loss of recency between Trial 1 and delayed recall may help to address gender-related delays in age of diagnosis of MCI or dementia.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• memory
• serial position
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.