Prospective memory function and cue salience in mild cognitive impairment: Findings from the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study

ABSTRACT

Objective: Prospective memory (PM) is crucial to the maintenance of functional independence in late adulthood and is consistently impaired in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). There remains a need for brief but valid measures of this construct that can be used as part of a comprehensive clinical assessment of cognition. Since the distinctiveness of PM cues is argued to determine the degree of strategic, controlled demands of PM paradigms, two variants of a brief measure were developed, one of which presented low-salience and the other high-salience PM cues.

Method: A large cohort of older adults with normal cognition or MCI was assessed with one of the two variants of our brief, novel measure of PM. Participants were asked to remember to execute PM tasks where the target cue was either high or low in salience, while concurrently engaged in an ongoing task of olfactory assessment.

Results: The task was able to discriminate between groups of participants with MCI or no cognitive impairment, albeit with a small effect size. The high-salience cue improved performance on the PM task; however, there was no interaction of cue salience with group.

Conclusions: These results suggest that the temporal reliability and construct validity of very brief measures of the type used in this study need further exploration to determine their potential to provide meaningful insights into PM function. This measure may have utility as a brief screening tool, with identified deficits being followed up with a more comprehensive PM assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Brief Smell Identification Test
• cue salience
• mild cognitive impairment
• prospective memory

Acknowledgments

​We thank the participants for their enthusiastic support. The Sydney Memory and Ageing Study Team contributed to data acquisition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.​

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC; Australia) [Capacity Building Grant, grant number 568940], [Program Grant, grant number 350833], [Program Grant, grant number 568969]; Nicole Kochan​ is supported by an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship. The authors have no financial interest arising from this work.​