Jason Doherty

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Statistician II at Washington University in St. Louis

Objective Daily driving behavior is ultimate measure of cognitive functioning requiring multiple cognitive domains working synergistically to complete this complex instrumental activity of daily living. As the world’s population continues to grow and age older, motor vehicle crashes become more frequent. Cognitive and brain reserve are developing c...

Importance Older adults are increasingly prescribed medications that have adverse effects. Prior studies have found a higher risk of motor vehicle crashes to be associated with certain medication use. Objective To determine whether specific medication classes were associated with performance decline as assessed by a standardized road test in a com...

The driving populace of the United States is aging. The prevalence of Alzheimer disease (AD) will increase in the coming decades. Road diets (that is, the reallocation of one or more lanes of car traffic to other uses) have been proposed as a modification to increase pedestrian safety, particularly for older adults. In contrast, we considered the i...

Objectives: To investigate the effect of neuropsychiatric symptoms and depression symptoms, respectively, and Alzheimer disease (AD) biomarkers (cerebrospinal fluid [CSF] or Positron Emission Tomography [PET] imaging) on the progression to incident cognitive impairment among cognitively normal older adults. Design: Prospective, observation, long...

Background Driving behavior as a digital marker and recent developments in blood-based biomarkers show promise as a widespread solution for the early identification of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Objective This study used artificial intelligence methods to evaluate the association between naturalistic driving behavior and blood-based biomarkers of A...

Background: Cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) as measured by cortical atrophy and white matter hyperintensities [leukoaraiosis], captured via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are increasing in prevalence due to the growth of the aging population and an increase in cardiovascular risk factors in the population. CSVD impacts cognitive function an...

Daily driving is a multi-faceted, real-world, behavioral measure of cognitive functioning requiring multiple cognitive domains working synergistically to complete this instrumental activity of daily living. As the global population of older adult continues to grow, motor vehicle crashes become more frequent among this demographic. Cognitive reserve...

Previous work indicates that imaging and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) amyloid and tau biomarkers are associated with driving behaviors, and that driving behaviors can be used to identify preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Along with traditional biomarkers, we examined the extent to which newer plasma and CSF biomarker are related to driving and cog...

Introduction: We investigated the relationship between preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers and adverse driving behaviors in a longitudinal analysis of naturalistic driving data. Methods: Naturalistic driving data collected using in-vehicle dataloggers from 137 community-dwelling older adults (65+) were used to model driving behavior...

Objectives To determine the extent to which cognitive domain scores moderate change in driving behavior in cognitively healthy older adults using naturalistic (GPS based) driving outcomes and to compare against self-reported outcomes using an established driving questionnaire. Method We analyzed longitudinal naturalistic driving behavior from a sa...

How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new in...

A thorough understanding of individual characteristics of older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic is critical for managing the ongoing pandemic course and planning for the future pandemics. Here, we explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on driving, social distancing, protective, and coping behaviors of older adults. This study reports data...

Our objective was to identify functional brain changes that associate with driving behaviors in older adults. Within a cohort of 64 cognitively normal adults (age 60+), we compared naturalistic driving behavior with resting state functional connectivity using machine learning. Functional networks associated with the ability to interpret and respond...

Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology accumulates for decades before the onset of cognitive decline. Cognitively normal individuals with biomarker evidence of AD brain pathology (i.e., biomarker+ or preclinical AD) can be differentiated from individuals without AD brain pathology based on naturalistic driving data, such as hard acceleration or braking a...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) studies in cognitively normal (CN) older adults age≥65 suggest depression is associated with molecular biomarkers (imaging and cerebrospinal fluid [CSF]). This study used linear mixed models (covariance pattern model) to assess whether baseline CSF biomarkers (Aβ42/Aβ40, t-Tau/Aβ42, p-Tau/Aβ42) predicted changes in non-depr...

Introduction: We examined baseline differences in depression and antidepressant use among cognitively normal older adults in five ethnoracial groups and assessed whether depression predicted a faster progression to incident cognitive impairment across groups. Methods: Data from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (n = 8168) were used to...

Within a cohort of cognitively normal older individuals, we compared performance on naturalistic driving with resting state functional connectivity using machine learning. Functional networks associated with the ability to interpret and respond to external sensory stimuli and the ability to multi-task were associated with measures of route selectio...

Working memory is defined by many as the system that allows us to simultaneously store information over brief time periods while engaging in other information processing activities. In a previous study (Rhodes, Jaroslawska et al. (2019) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148, 1204–1227.) we found that retention of serially presented lette...

Multiple theories of working memory are described in the chapters of this book and often these theories are viewed as being mutually incompatible, yet each is associated with a supporting body of empirical evidence. This chapter argues that many of these differences reflect different research questions, different levels of explanation, and differen...

Working Memory data on 408,938 participants collected over the internet. Also available at https://osf.io/ak5pb/

Although there is evidence that the effect of including a concurrent processing demand on the storage of information in working memory is disproportionately larger for older than younger adults, not all studies show this age-related impairment, and the critical factors responsible for any such impairment remain elusive. Here we assess whether domai...

There are few examples of an extended adversarial collaboration, in which investigators committed to different theoretical views collaborate to test opposing predictions. Whereas previous adversarial collaborations have produced single research articles, here, we share our experience in programmatic, extended adversarial collaboration involving thr...

Working memory is defined by many as the system that allows us to simultaneously store information over brief time periods while engaging in other information processing activities. In a previous study (Rhodes et al., 2019) we found that retention of serially presented letters was disrupted by the introduction of an arithmetic processing task durin...

There is a theoretical disagreement in the working memory literature, with some proposing that the storage and processing of information rely on distinct parts of the cognitive system and others who posit that they rely, to some extent, on a shared attentional capacity. This debate is mirrored in the literature on working memory and aging, where th...

Theories of working memory often disagree on the relationships between processing and storage, particularly on how heavily they rely on an attention-based limited resource. Some posit separation and specialization of resources resulting in minimal interference to memory when completing an ongoing processing task, while others argue for a greater ov...

There is a theoretical disagreement in the working memory literature, with some proposing that the storage and processing of information rely on distinct parts of the cognitive system and others who posit that they rely, to some extent, on a shared attentional capacity. This debate is mirrored in the literature on working memory and aging, where th...

In experimental studies, whereas working memory is often pushed to the limits of its capacity, recall performance rarely falls to zero, regardless of memory or processing load. A key question is thus to understand the cognitive functions supporting this residual performance. Here, investigators associated with three different theoretical frameworks...

Working memory research often focuses on measuring the capacity of the system and how it relates to other cognitive abilities. However, research into the structure of working memory is less concerned with an overall capacity measure but rather with the intricacies of underlying components and their contribution to different tasks. A number of model...

Performance on psychometric tests is key to diagnosis and monitoring treatment of dementia. Results are often reported as a total score, but there is additional information in individual items of tests which vary in their difficulty and discriminatory value. Item difficulty refers to an ability level at which the probability of responding correctly...

Speech reminders can severely disrupt list recall. Spearcons, time-compressed speech messages, might be less disruptive because they are much shorter. In this study, we asked 24 younger participants to recall 64 short lists of digit, animal, food, or furniture names. List items were presented one at a time; the number of items presented depended on...