Symbol processing during normal and pathological aging

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Max Töpper
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 314496754

Patients suffering from Alzheimer disease (AD) often show severe orientation deficits. In clinical and domestic settings, signs and symbols often provide the only option to compensate for these deficits. However, there is a body of literature providing evidence for deficient symbol comprehension in AD. In fact, whether AD patients benefit from symbols seems to be dependent from certain symbol characteristics. Some nursing homes have already implemented optimized symbols but there are hardly any evidence-based studies that confirm their effectiveness. Some intervention studies investigated the effects of personal staff training, physical rearrangements on hospital wards and the establishment of optimized signs. Consistently, positive effects were reported but most of these studies examined the cumulative effect of their interventions so that the results do not allow inferences about the differential effect of optimized symbols. Taken together, it remains unclear whether and to what extent AD patients benefit from certain symbols, whereas other symbols even impede symbol comprehension in AD. Moreover, it is unknown whether patients suffering from other mental or neurodegenerative disorders may benefit from certain symbol characteristics in the same way. To address these issues, the current study will include healthy seniors, AD patients, patients suffering from mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). In a first experiment, symbol processing skills will be assessed with a symbol processing task (SPT). The identified deficit profiles will help to create efficient signs that will be evaluated in a second experiment with the main aim to confirm performance differences between AD patients and healthy controls in a realistic setting and to examine the benefit of optimized symbols and dual coding.The planned study is of high scientific, practical and diagnostic value. In a scientific context, the results will help to shed some light onto the heterogeneous concept of symbol comprehension and to identify the deficient cognitive subprocesses that are associated with a symbol processing dysfunction in the different experimental groups. In a practical context, our findings will provide basic knowledge for the creation of efficient signs whose advantage will be practically evaluated. Finally, the study may provide important diagnostic information. An early detection of AD and MCI with the SPT would allow an appropriate treatment in early disease stages when it is most effective. Further, the SPT could obtain important information for a differentiation between AD and MDD which is also highly relevant for further treatment planning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants