Vanessa Taler

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Ottawa

Recovery from university grade inflation after the COVID-19 pandemic varies by faculty Higher education institutions worldwide report a drastic increase in grades during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since it was not paralleled by an increase in student achievements, the consensus is that the pandemic came with grade inflation, which exceeded the systemat...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) involves a decline in episodic memory and, in many cases, language. Taler et al. (2021) developed a set of story recall materials that we expected to be sensitive to changes in language in normal aging and MCI. Here, we examined the lexical (word-level) contents of participants' story recall responses from Taler et a...

Older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) have a higher risk of developing future cognitive decline than those without SCD. However, the association between SCD and objective cognitive performance remains unclear. This PRISMA 2020‐compliant systematic review aims to provide a qualitative assessment of the longitudinal and cross‐sectional...

We investigated the prevalence and population attributable fraction (PAF) of 12 potentially modifiable risk factors for dementia in middle-aged and older Canadians. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 30,097 adults aged 45 to 85 with baseline data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (2011‒2015). Risk factors and associated relative ri...

L’ambiguïté est omniprésente dans le langage. La notion d’ambiguïté lexicale fait renvoi aux situations où un mot a différentes significations. La présente enquête s’est penchée sur les homonymes, à savoir des mots ayant la même orthographe et la même prononciation dans la langue de l’étude (soit l’anglais), mais plusieurs significations différente...

Objective People with aphasia often experience semantic memory (SM) impairment. To improve diagnostic outcomes, SM tasks should recruit various sensory input channels (oral, written, and pictographic), permitting accessible, complete evaluation. There is a need for SM batteries for French-speaking Quebecers that use multiple input channels. The pre...

Objective People with aphasia often experience semantic memory (SM) impairment. To improve diagnostic outcomes, SM tasks should recruit various sensory input channels (oral, written, and pictographic), permitting accessible, complete evaluation. There is a need for SM batteries for French-speaking Quebecers that use multiple input channels. The pre...

Background: Identification and assessment of modifiable risk factors for dementia is a public health priority in Canada and worldwide. We investigated the prevalence and population attributable fraction (PAF) of 12 potentially modifiable risk factors for all-cause dementia in middle-aged and older Canadians. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional...

Recent cognitive neuroscience research has uncovered some similarities and some differences between General semantic memory (e.g., knowledge about family in general) and Personal semantic memory (PS; e.g., knowledge about my family). To better understand the representational content and cognitive processes of PS and their relation to general semant...

Introduction The prevalence of mild and major neurocognitive disorders (NCDs), also referred to as mild cognitive impairment and dementia, is rising globally. The prevention of NCDs is a major global public health interest. We sought to synthesize the literature on potentially modifiable risk factors for NCDs. Methods We conducted an umbrella revie...

Introduction In population-based research, disease ascertainment algorithms can be as accurate as, and less costly than, performing supplementary clinical examinations on selected participants to confirm a diagnosis of a neurocognitive disorder (NCD), but they require cohort-specific validation. To optimise the use of the Canadian Longitudinal Stud...

Background Prevalence of overall cognitive impairment based on each participant’s performance across a neuropsychological battery is challenging; consequently, we define and validate a dichotomous cognitive impairment/no cognitive indicator (CII) using a neuropsychological battery administered in a population-based study. This CII approximates the...

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university‐level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spel...

Objective: Self-perceived cognitive functioning, considered highly relevant in the context of aging and dementia, is assessed in numerous ways-hindering the comparison of findings across studies and settings. Therefore, the present study aimed to link item-level self-report questionnaire data from international aging studies. Method: We harmoniz...

Background: Symptom persistence in non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients, also known as Long COVID or Post-acute Sequelae of COVID-19, is not well characterized or understood, and few studies have included non-COVID-19 control groups. Methods: We used data from a cross-sectional COVID-19 questionnaire (September-December 2020) linked to baseline (2...

Background People with obesity are at increased risk of chronic stress, and this may have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are also associated with both obesity and stress, and may modify risk of stress among people with obesity. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the associations between...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) involves declines in language and episodic memory. Episodic memory is often assessed using language tasks. To prevent linguistic factors from confounding recall scores, memory and language should be jointly examined. We explored linguistic patterns on a story recall task among cognitively healthy adults aged 65+ (n=1...

Background frailty imparts a higher risk for hospitalisation, mortality and morbidity due to COVID-19 infection, but the broader impacts of the pandemic and associated public health measures on community-living people with frailty are less known. Methods we used cross-sectional data from 23,974 Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging participants who...

The field of psycholinguistics has recently questioned the primacy of word frequency (WF) in influencing word recognition and production, instead focusing on the importance of a word's contextual diversity (CD). WF is operationalized by counting the number of occurrences of a word in a corpus, while a word's CD is a count of the number of contexts...

Background The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created a spectrum of adversities that have affected older adults disproportionately. This paper examines older adults with multimorbidity using longitudinal data to ascertain why some of these vulnerable individuals coped with pandemic-induced risk and stressors better than others – t...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted access to healthcare services in Canada. Research prior to the pandemic has found that depression and anxiety symptoms were associated with increased unmet healthcare needs. The primary objective of this study was to examine if mental health was associated with perceived access to healthcare during the p...

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD), a self‐reported decline in cognition, may be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, SCD‐related worry has been implicated in predicting the progression from SCD to further cognitive decline. Certain personality traits have been linked to cognitive health (i.e., conscientiousness, emotional‐stability, an...

Objectives This study aimed to characterize verbal fluency performance in monolinguals and bilinguals using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Methods A large sample of adults aged 45–85 (n = 12,875) completed a one-minute animal fluency task in English. Participants were English-speaking monolinguals (n = 9,759), bilingual...

A growing body of research suggests that bilingualism may afford benefits to certain aspects of cognitive functioning. Inconsistent findings may arise because of methodological differences within and across studies. One limitation is that studies often compare linguistically similar languages. The present study recorded brain activity (event-relate...

The field of psycholinguistics has recently questioned the primacy of word frequency (WF) in influencing word recognition and production, focusing on the importance of a word’s contextual diversity (CD). WF is operationalized by counting the number of occurrences of a word in a corpus, while a word’s CD is a count of the number of contexts that a w...

Introduction: Subjective cognitive decline (SCD), a self-reported decline in cognition in otherwise cognitively healthy people, has been acknowledged as a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a large national study with participants' ages of 45-85 years at baseline, we sought to iden...

The involuntary detection of acoustic change following presentation of rarely presented deviant auditory stimulus will elicit an event-related potential (ERP), the deviant-related negativity (DRN). If the deviant stimulus is potentially highly relevant, a later P3a may also be elicited. This is thought to reflect processes associated with the switc...

BACKGROUND: Prevalence of overall cognitive impairment based on each participant’s performance across a neuropsychological battery is challenging; consequently, we define and validate a dichotomous cognitive impairment/no cognitive indicator (CII) using a neuropsychological battery administered in a population-based study. This CII approximates the...

Objective: Most research investigating neurocognitive changes in participants with PTSD has focused on young adults. Numerous studies have recognized the crucial role of social support in diminishing the likelihood of developing PTSD. The current study evaluates the cognitive performance of middle-aged and older adults with symptoms of PTSD, and e...

Importance The association of COVID-19 not requiring hospitalization with functional mobility in community-dwelling adults above and beyond the impact of the pandemic control measures implemented in 2020 remains to be elucidated. Objective To evaluate the association between a COVID-19 diagnosis and change in mobility and physical function of adul...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, with over 233 million confirmed cases and over 4.6 million deaths globally as of September 20211. Although many studies have reported worse mental health outcomes during the early weeks of the pandemic, some sources suggest a gradual decrease in a...

Objective: Creation of normative data with regression corrections for demographic covariates reduces risk of small cell sizes compared with traditional normative approaches. We explored whether methods of correcting for demographic covariates (e.g., full regression models versus hybrid models with stratification and regression) and choice of covari...

Much research effort is currently devoted to the development of a simple, low-cost method to determine early signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology. The present study employs a simple paradigm in which event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to a single auditory stimulus that was presented rapidly or very slowly while the participant was...

The occurrence of a very infrequent and unattended auditory stimulus is highly salient and may result in an interruption of the frontoparietal network controlling processing priorities. Research has suggested that older adults may be unable to compute the level of salience of unattended stimulus inputs. A multi-channel EEG was recorded in 20 younge...

Introduction The recording of resting-state EEG may provide a means to predict early cognitive decline associated with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Previous studies have typically used very short recording times to avoid a confound with drowsiness that may occur in longer recordings. The effects of a longer recording have not however been syste...

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) refers to a perceived decline in cognitive function in the absence of neuropsychological deficits. Older adults with SCD are at increased of subsequent development of mild cognitive impairment or dementia. We had 224 adults aged 65+ complete questionnaires assessing their subjective appraisal of their cognitive fu...

Objectives We investigated rates of cognitive decline at three-year follow-up from initial examination in people reporting mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) with loss of consciousness (LOC) more than a year prior to initial examination. We examined the role of social support as predictors of preserved cognitive function in this sample. Method Ana...

Objectives The present study aimed to characterize changes in verbal fluency performance across the lifespan using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Methods We examined verbal fluency performance in a large sample of adults aged 45–85 (n = 12,686). Data are from the Tracking cohort of the CLSA. Participants completed a com...

Recall of story materials is a primary way to assess episodic memory. However, the standard scoring method may not be maximally sensitive to cognitive decline. We developed a set of 24 stories, and younger and older adults heard these stories and recalled them immediately and after a delay (Study 1). Twelve of these stories were then selected, and...

Potentially highly relevant but unattended auditory stimuli may result in attention capture. The detection of stimulus change is associated with two event-related potentials: the deviant-related negativity (DRN), whose amplitude varies with the extent of change, and the P3a, which is elicited only by stimuli deemed to be highly relevant. In the pre...

Semantic memory is stable in healthy older adults but shows decline in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Current measures of semantic function do not assess multiple aspects of semantic function and/or are time-consuming to administer. Here we report the psychometric properties of a battery to detect semantic impairment that we recently developed an...

The goal of this commentary is to highlight the ageism that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20 international researchers in the field of aging have contributed to this document. This commentary discusses how older people are misrepresented and undervalued in the current public discourse surrounding the pandemic. It points to issues i...

The goal of this commentary is to highlight the ageism that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20 international researchers in the field of ageing have contributed to this document. This commentary discusses how older people are misrepresented and undervalued in the current public discourse surrounding the pandemic. It points to issues...

Previous research has suggested that bilinguals may exhibit cognitive advantages over those who are monolingual, although conflicting results have been reported. This advantage may be heightened in older adults, because of age-related cognitive decline. However, the effects of bilingualism on working memory performance in older adults remain unknow...

Objective: We examined the extent to which loss of consciousness (LOC) following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) may be associated with impairments in executive functions and declarative memory more than a year after brain injury. Method: Analyses were run on 548 participants who had self-reported LOC of <1 min, 441 with LOC of 1–20 min, and 13,...

It is well-established that semantic deficits are observed in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, the extent of impairment in different aspects of semantic function remains unclear, and may be influenced by the tasks used to assess performance. In the present study, people with MCI and cognitively healthy older adults completed a series of ta...

The effects of aging on cognition are not uniform. Rather, certain aspects of attention and memory are adversely affected by aging, whereas other cognitive domains are relatively preserved, and others even show positive age-related changes. Several cognitive theories have been advanced to explain these aging-related patterns, but none has yet preva...

Previous research examining whether bilinguals exhibit enhanced working memory (WM) compared to monolinguals has yielded mixed results. This inconsistency may be due to lack of sensitivity in behavioral and neuropsychological measures. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of bilingualism on WM by focusing on brain activity patterns (e...

The current study investigated behavioral and electrophysiological (event-related potential; ERP) differences associated with task switching in a sample of young and older monolingual and bilingual adults. ERPs associated with task preparation (switch and mixing positivity) and task execution processes (N2 and P3b) were investigated. Participants p...

Large-scale studies present the opportunity to create normative comparison standards relevant to populations. Sampling weights applied to the sample data facilitate extrapolation to the population of origin, but normative scores are often developed without the use of these sampling weights because the values derived from large samples are presumed...

Purpose Currently, there is no reliable instrument to measure naming abilities in bilingual speakers of English and French. The Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983)is a widely used scale for clinical assessments of language function, but it is not suitable to assess bilinguals. Rasch analysis provides a unique and powerful...

Variations in brain activation may lead to individual differences in working memory performance. Such differences may account for contradictory findings in the literature relating to age-related changes in neural activation during working memory tasks. In the present study, thirty-nine young adults (aged 18-30) and 34 older adults (aged 65+) comple...

Objective: We present descriptive information on the cognitive measures used in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) Comprehensive Cohort, relate this to information on these measures in the extant literature, and identify key considerations for their use in research and clinical practice. Method: The CLSA Comprehensive Cohort is compose...

Background: Cognitive deficits are correlated with increasing age and become more pronounced for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease (AD). Conventional methods to diagnose cognitive decline (i.e., neuropsychological testing and clinical judgment) can lead to false positives. Tools such as electroe...

ObjectiveA pilot study to determine the feasibility of recruiting patients with MCI to test for cognitive interventions.Method Thirty patients with amnestic MCI were to be divided into two intervention arms and one control group. Participants went to local sites and completed brain training for one hour three times per week for nine weeks. Outcome...

Bilingualism has been found to enhance the ability to store and manipulate information in working memory (WM). However, previous studies of WM function in bilingualism have been limited to behavioural measures, leaving questions unanswered regarding the effects of bilingualism on neural mechanisms employed during WM tasks. We recorded brain activit...

People underestimate how much their preferences will change in the future, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a "presentism bias." Recently, we found that this presentism bias is attenuated when thinking about the preferences of other people. The aim of this study was to investigate whether predicting future preferences also differs depending on...

Objective: The aim of this study was to verify the effect of age, education and sex on Miami Prospective Memory Test (MPMT) performance obtained at baseline of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) by neurologically healthy French- and English-speaking subsamples of participants (N = 18,511). Method: The CLSA is a nation-wide large epi...

Background: Mild cognitive deficits are more likely to occur with increasing age, and become more pronounced for people diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Conventional methods to identify cognitive declines (i.e., neuropsychological testing and clinical judgment) can lead to false positive diagnoses of cog...

Objective: We aimed to examine the extent to which loss of consciousness (LOC) following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) may be associated with impairments in time- and event-based prospective memory (PM). PM is thought to involve executive processes and be subserved by prefrontal regions. Neuroimaging research suggests alterations to these are...

Objective: We detail a new approach to the creation of normative data for neuropsychological tests. The traditional approach to normative data creation is to make demographic adjustments based on observations of correlations between single neuropsychological tests and selected demographic variables. We argue, however, that this does not describe t...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is characterised by subjective and objective memory impairment in the absence of dementia. MCI is a strong predictor for the development of Alzheimer's disease, and may represent an early stage in the disease course in many cases. A standard task used in the diagnosis of MCI is verbal fluency, where participants prod...

Objective: The purpose of the study was to develop a scoring system for a novel naming task suitable for assessing naming performance in younger (18-30 years) and older (65+ years) adults in monolingual English, monolingual French, and English-French bilingual groups. This novel naming task will serve as an important health service to help diagnose...

Objective: We describe the implementation of cognitive measures within the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a nationwide, epidemiological study of aging, and relate CLSA Tracking cohort data (n over 20,000) to previous studies using these measures. Method: CLSA participants (aged 45-85, n over 50,000) provided demographic, social, ph...

Semantic richness is a multidimensional construct that can be defined as the amount of semantic information associated with a concept. Objective: To investigate neurophysiological correlates of semantic richness information associated with words and its interaction with task demands. Method: Two different dimensions of semantic richness (number of...

The effect of number of senses (NoS), a measure of semantic richness, was examined in monolingual English speakers (n = 17) and bilingual speakers of English and French (n = 18). Participants completed lexical decision tasks while EEG was recorded: monolinguals completed the task in English only, and bilinguals completed two lexical decision tasks,...

Frequency effects are pervasive in studies of language, with higher frequency words being recognized faster than lower frequency words. However, the exact nature of frequency effects has recently been questioned, with some studies finding that contextual information provides a better fit to lexical decision and naming data than word frequency (Adel...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is defined as impairment in cognitive function in the absence of dementia, and in many cases it represents a prodromal state of dementia. Semantic function is impaired in MCI, but the exact nature of the impairment remains to be understood. The present study aimed to investigate the nature of this impairment using tw...

Objectives: We examined performance on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) in older and younger adults who were monolingual English or French speakers, or bilingual speakers of English and French (n=215). Methods: Monolingual participants completed the task in their native language, and bilingual participants completed the task in English, French, and...

Previous research suggests that bilinguals demonstrate superior cognitive control processes than monolinguals. The goal of the current investigation was to examine whether this “bilingual advantage” is observed in a language processing task that requires inhibition, i.e., lexical ambiguity processing. Monolingual and bilingual participants read sen...

Previous research suggests that bilinguals demonstrate superior cognitive control processes than monolinguals. The goal of the current investigation was to examine whether this “bilingual advantage” is observed in a language processing task that requires inhibition, i.e., lexical ambiguity processing. Monolingual and bilingual participants read sen...

We examined the use of sentence context in lexical processing in aging and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Younger and older adults and participants with MCI completed a lexical decision task in which target words were primed by sentences biasing a related or unrelated word (e.g., prime: “The baby put the spoon in his ______”, biased word: “mouth”...

Age-related face recognition deficits are characterized by high false alarms to unfamiliar faces, are not as pronounced for other complex stimuli, and are only partially related to general age-related impairments in cognition. This paper reviews some of the underlying processes likely to be implicated in theses deficits by focusing on areas where c...