Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speakers: Sarah MacPherson (University of Edinburgh)

Topic: The impact of age, aetiology, and cognitive reserve on the cognitive performance of frontal and posterior patients

Abstract: Neuropsychological group studies are one of the main methods to examine the organisation of frontal-executive abilities. Such studies typically consider patients with lesions due to different aetiologies such as stroke or tumour as one group and few studies have compared the performance of these different types of patients on neuropsychological measures. Furthermore, it is widely known that the cognitive response to brain damage and/or age-related changes can significantly vary across individuals due to their premorbid efficiency, capacity and flexibility of cognitive processing. In this talk, I will discuss recent work that examines the influence of age, aetiology and the independent effects of two CR proxies, education and NART IQ on measures of executive function as well as other neuropsychological tests in large groups of patients with focal, unilateral frontal or nonfrontal lesions. The findings suggest that the distinct protective effects of education and NART IQ are limited to specific cognitive measures and that age plays a role in frontal-executive performance in addition to the contribution of these CR proxies.