Memory problems assessing

There also are numerous highly regarded, creative, and sophisticated tests to assess attention, concentration, and ECF, and these tests usually have manuals with age-corrected norms and sometimes provide sample test profiles of people with drug problems to compare with your client s profile. The WMS, for example, has a section that assesses attention and concentration in addition to memory functions. Another well-known attention and concentration test is the Symbol-Digit Modalities Test (Smith, 1991). Some of the more well-known measures of ECF and related cognitive functions include the Wisconsin Card Sorting... 

Any concerns about a decline in memory or other intellectual skills in an elderly patient should lead you to perform an assessment for dementia. During your interview, you should look for signs of memory-related problems. You should ask the following questions of both the patient and a family member ... 

This interpretational problem can be diminished by training the animals up to stabilized performance (Roux et al. 1994). Once stabilized, the behavior will more clearly reflect short-term memory because the learning component is no longer present. Indeed, once alternation performance is stabilized, it is possible to introduce delays of different lengths and thereby assess decreases in response accuracy as the retention delay is increased (delay-dependent forgetting). Thus, once animals have been trained up to stabilized performance, they can be used repeatedly to evaluate different drag treatments. 

Conclusions. There is now considerable evidence that peptide hormones and catecholamines have the potential to act on acquisition, on the maintenance of learned responses, and on memory processing. The neurobiological mechanisms by which these systems act is less clear. The problem is not that central effects of the hormones and drugs are unknown but, rather, that too many effects are recognized. Therefore, it is difficult to assess which of this large set of events mediates the hormonal and aminergic... 

It should be apparent that test developers must ensure that some relevant hook into schema knowledge be present in a novel problem so that the student will retrieve a useful schema from memory. Novice problem solvers will not have as many avenues of access to schema knowledge as will experienced solvers, and they may need several overt cues to help them access their schema knowledge. Test items that do not activate schema knowledge have little value for our assessment, because we are left not knowing whether the item itself is at fault for failing to tap the schema or whether the schema is indeed missing or malformed. 

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