Miami Prospective Memory Test in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this study was to verify the effect of age, education and sex on Miami Prospective Memory Test (MPMT) performance obtained at baseline of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) by neurologically healthy French- and English-speaking subsamples of participants (N = 18,511). Method: The CLSA is a nation-wide large epidemiological study with participants aged 45–85 years old at baseline. The MPMT is an event- and time-based measure of prospective memory, with scores of intention, accuracy and need for reminders, administered as part of the Comprehensive data collection. Participants who did not self-report any conditions that could impact cognition were selected, which resulted in 15,103 English- and 3408 French-speaking participants. The samples are stratified according to four levels of education and four age groups (45–54; 55–64; 65–74; 75+). Results: There is a significant age effect for English- and French-speaking participants on the Event-based, Time-based, and Event- + Time-based scores of the MPMT. The effect of the education level was also demonstrated on the three MPMT scores in the English-speaking group. The score ‘Intention to perform’ was the most sensitive to the effect of age in both the English and French samples. Sex had no impact on performance on the MPMT. Conclusions: This study confirms the impact of age and level of education on this new prospective memory task. It informs future research with this measure including the development of normative data in French- and English-speaking Canadians on the Event-based and Time-based MPMT.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Miami Prospective Memory Test
• older adults
• CLSA
• population-based

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible using the data collected by the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Funding for the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) was provided by the Government of Canada through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) under grant reference: LSA 9447 and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. This research has been conducted using the CLSA Baseline Comprehensive dataset version 2.0 under Application Number 160606. Lauren Griffith is supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator’s Award, and the McLaughlin Foundation Professorship in Population and Public Health. Parminder Raina holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Geroscience and the Raymond and Margaret Labarge Chair in Research and Knowledge Application for Optimal Aging.

Notes

1. Even though the distributions of scores were highly negatively skewed and the cell sizes were very unbalanced (particularly by education level), we conducted the analyses without transformations of the dependent variable because (a) the within cell standard deviations were very similar across groups and the ANOVA is robust to violations of the homogeneity of variance assumption even with unequal n’s; and (b) we wanted to be able to interpret and compare the group means based on the actual, and not transformed, scores. We note here that the second set of analyses, based on the cut-offs and tested using non-parametric χ² tests, corroborated the findings from the ANOVAs. Furthermore, we also conducted OLS linear regression analyses with age in years and education level as continuous variables. These analyses resulted in the same conclusions as reported here: Age (in years) was a statistically significant predictor of the test scores, while sex and education level were not.