HAI Book 2025 - Flipbook - Page 445
Kraft, Jessica
116
Longitudinal change in mnemonic discrimination and influence of Aβ
burden
Jessica Kraft1, Jahnavi Nair1, Chen Gonen1, Marci Skotnicki1, Karen Rodrigue1, Kristen
Kennedy1
1
Center for Vital Longevity, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, US
Introduction: The ability to remember and discriminate among highly similar objects, a function of the
hippocampus, declines with healthy aging, but is abjectly impaired in Alzheimer9s disease. Mnemonic
discrimination tasks may serve as early indicators of incipient pathology. Indeed, our group found that increasing
beta-amyloid (SUVR) was associated with decreasing discrimination. To be useful for disease prediction,
longitudinal follow-up performance must be assessed; however, no longitudinal studies to date exist examining
within-person change. Thus, the current study assessed longitudinal change in mnemonic similarity task (MST)
performance in relation to Α´ deposition in cognitively-healthy adults.
Methods: 133 adults (aged 53-92 years at baseline) completed the MST, with 64 returning an average of 42.37
months later. MST requires participants to encode object pairs and their locations on the screen, followed by a
recognition memory task (
