Engineering360: "Simple At-Home Test Could Detect Early Cognitive Decline"

Simple at home test for cognitive decline is common knowledge and widely practiced...

..."Where are my keys???"

The mentally impaired individuals were faster than the healthy, what does this prove? A few milliseconds one way or the other is pretty thin evidence of anything....

..."The average (median) reaction time is 215 milliseconds"...

https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/

...You scored 317.0. You're currently in the top 33 percentile for this test!...

...You scored 282.0. You're currently in the top 50 percentile for this test!"...

Huh?

"...The mentally impaired individuals were faster than the healthy, what does this prove?..."

It probably doesn't diffinitively prove anything. It does suggest.

It suggests delay in response is not a good reason to be suspicious of the quality of the response.

It suggests at out best we have an excess of processing power available and may commonly 'overthink' even the most simple tasks.

It could betray a teeming multitude of diverse impulses each competing for enough conscious attention to become The thought/action.

It might add support for the model of the brain where functioning regions actively attempt to dumb down other adjacent areas, (kind of like how plants grow their tallest parts fastest) so that the remaining undamaged parts are at an advantage in some respects.

It probably points to a bias which conflates 'quick' with 'smart' that is probably widespread.

No, not buying it.....reaction time declines with age, and mentally impaired slows even more...it's not rocket science...These figures are highly suspect....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586814/

Okay. The answers can still be valid.

..."You scored 262.0. You're currently in the top 64 percentile for this test!"...

I'm getting faster, I must be turning senile as we speak.....

Well, I guess you could be right, perhaps they have it exactly backwards...Could your improving score then indicate that as you age you are losing more and more of all the senility with which you were born?

That's an interesting study.

On a side note, the demographics of the participants makes me curious about selection...

"... The 3616 respondents in the final sample ranged from 32 to 85 years with a mean age of 55.06 years (SD=12.06). Data are grouped into 5 age groups: G1 (32–44, N= 806); G2 (45–54, N=1019); G3 (55–64, N= 939); G4 (65–74, N=589); G5 (75–85, N= 263). Women comprised 53.7% of the sample. There were 40.5% with a four-year college degree or higher, and the average self-rated health on a five-point scale was 3.67 (SD=.96). Because the sample included 369 twins ..."

More than 10% twins?!? Before 1980 the birthrate for twins was less than 2%. The researchers did run the numbers with twins and siblings removed and there wasn't much difference, but it still makes me wonder about how similar and possibly nonrepresentative of typical the sample might be.

This lot may have been from a group registered to be available to participate in cognitive testing in a general sense...twins are always in demand for testing , similar genetic traits and all....

Does demand affect nonremunerated supply significantly for something like this?