Symposium 14: Patterns of Learning Performance on List Learning Tasks: Do They Mitigate Gender Differences in Memory?

Summary abstract

Women tend to perform better than men on episodic verbal memory tests across the age span, which may contribute to gender-related disparities in diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment and dementia. Patterns of learning performance may be better indicators of potential memory problems and address gender differences. The serial position effect, specifically a J-curve (reduced primacy relative to recency), is predictive of dementia, but few studies have examined gender differences in serial position. Learning ratio (LR) is a recently developed calculation for the extent to which an individual benefits from repeated exposure to a word list. LR has shown strong relationships to memory performance and memory impairment. Gender differences on LR have been inconsistently identified. Whether or not men and women show differential relationships of serial position or LR to other memory indicators, however, has not been examined. In the four papers within this symposium, we examine the relationship of serial position and LR to memory outcomes in four samples of older adults, with a focus on whether gender moderates these relationships. We also examine the relationship of memory process variables to cortisol. The first two papers used the RBANS. Alexander et al. found that, within a sample of 203 healthy older adults (133 women) with no diagnosis of MCI or dementia, men and women did not differ on LR and there was no differential prediction for LR by gender with delayed memory variables. Do and colleagues demonstrated that, within a sample of 338 older adults (228 women) with no diagnosis of MCI or dementia, men and women did not differ in primacy, but men did worse on recency. While 23% of the sample showed a J-curve pattern, this did not differ by gender, and the pattern was highly predictive of memory performance for both men and women. Thus, at least for the RBANS, these two studies suggest LR and primacy avoid gender confounds seen in traditional memory measures. The last two papers included assessment of cortisol. Lambertus et al. found that, in a sample of 60 older adults, 26 of whom were caregivers for persons with dementia, caregivers performed worse on recency, but not primacy. They also reported more stress but were not different in hair cortisol concentration. Within the full sample, perceived stress was related to recency, but not primacy; hair cortisol was not related to either perceived stress or primacy/recency. Finally, Pizzonia and colleagues report AVLT learning process findings from a sample of 100 healthy older adults (44 men). They found that women were better on both LR and primacy, but not recency. However, LR and primacy were not differentially related to memory outcomes in men and women, although there were differential relationships of recency to AVLT. Potential gender moderation of relationships between cortisol and LR/primacy performance were also observed. Overall, findings suggest that there may be gender differences in AVLT-related learning process tests, but that their relationship to memory outcome variables may be similar across genders. Implications of these findings for assessment will be discussed.