Events

Vicroria Leavitt, PhD - Associate Professor of Neuropsychology, Columbia Univ. Irving Medical Center

 Jan 22, 2025 @ 11:30 a.m.

Accurate measurement of cognitive change is essential for research and clinical care in neurologic populations. Precision tools allow the identification of neural substrates and permit the detection of meaningful change on the individual patient level. The digital age presents an opportunity to develop superior measurement instruments leveraging scalability, reliability, and ecological validity. We aimed to develop a tool that would be acceptable across cultures, in diverse socioeconomic, technology‐level, literacy‐level, and geographic populations. To optimize our tool to detect subtle cognitive change (e.g., as a marker of preclinical dementia), we created a 'cognitive stress test,' that would be impervious to floor and ceiling effects, and personalizable: the Language & Memory Test (LMT), a brief (4 minutes), multimodal, unsupervised digital test. To date, the LMT has been administered to over 1000 people in 4 countries in 3 countries, in urban and rural dwelling areas, to technology‐naive and low‐education individuals, and in ethnically/racially diverse communities. Initial psychometric properties of the test are encouraging; feasibility, acceptability, and usability are strong. Ongoing research with the LMT includes pilots in a USbased audiology clinic, in rural India, an MS clinic in Prague, and a collaboration with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University to evaluate simultaneous EEG during LMT performance. We have discovered posture/behavior syllable‐related ensembles in the brain.

Host: Univ. Rochester SMD, Dept. Neuroscience, and Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience