Liane Kaufmann’s research while affiliated with University of Innsbruck and other places

Old age is critically associated with multi-morbidity, chronic pain, and high risk for dementia. Recognizing and treating pain is very much dependent on language comprehension and production. Both may be impaired in dementia. Moreover, neuropsychiatric symptoms may interact with pain perception. The main aims of the present article were 1) to identify key areas for future research to elucidate the relation between pain and associated neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia, and 2) to provide a conceptual framework for ameliorating the clinical process of recognizing, assessing, and managing pain in non-communicating patients with advanced dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) imposes a major burden on affected individuals, their caregivers and health-care systems alike. Though quite many risk factors for disease progression have been identified, there is a lack of prospective studies investigating the interplay and predictive value of a wide variety of patient variables associated with cognitive deterioration (defined as key feature of AD progression). Study participants were patients with probable and possible AD, that were assessed at four time points over a period of two years (T1-T4). The main results were threefold: (i) over time, significant changes were observed regarding patients’ cognitive functioning, activities of daily living and caregiver load (but not depression, pain, neuropsychiatric symptoms); (ii) intercorrelations between caregiver load and patients’ cognitive and functional variables were high, correlation patterns remaining rather stable across time; (iii) cognitive functioning at T4 was best predicted by patients’ age, sex, atrial fibrillation and activities of daily living at T1; and (iv) across all four assessment points, cognitive functioning was best predicted by time (i.e., disease duration), age, sex, activities of daily living and depression. Overall, even in early stages of AD and during a short two-year period, functional changes were significant and tightly intertwined with caregiver load, thus stressing the need to consider caregiver load when diagnosing and treating patients with AD. A novel and clinically relevant finding is that even in early stages of AD, cognitive deterioration was best predicted by a combination of patients’ demographic, somatic and functional variables.

The numerical Stroop task involves presenting participants with two digits that differ in physical size and numerical value and asking them to report which digit had the larger size or value while ignoring the other dimension. Previous studies show that participants have difficulty ignoring the irrelevant dimension and thus have implications on the automaticity of numerical processing. The present study investigates the automatic influence of numerical value on numerosity processing in a novel Stroop-like task. In two experiments, participants were presented with digits made of colored stripes and asked to identify the number of different colors. In both experiments, interference and facilitation effects were found, supporting the automaticity of symbolic number processing and its influence on numerosity processing. These findings expand upon previous research on numerical as well as counting Stroop tasks and have potential implications for studying interference and basic numerical processing in children and clinical populations.

In the present study, we conducted a Stroop-like task in which the participants were required to decide whether the presented stimulus, which could be either a colored digit or a colored rectangle, consisted of more or less than five colors. Like other Stroop-like tasks, the stimuli could be congruent (the stimulus was a digit that was equal to the presented number of colors), incongruent (the stimulus was a digit that was different than the presented number of colors), or neutral (a colored rectangle). We utilized a two-to-one response setting so that in some incongruent trials the digit and the number of colors would elicit the same response (e.g., the digit 3 containing two colors; both are smaller than 5), while in some incongruent trials, the digit and the number of colors would elicit different responses (e.g., the digit 3 containing 6 colors). This enabled us to measure both conflicts arising from stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response compatibilities. Our results indicated the existence of stimulusstimulus compatibility (SSC), stimulus-response compatibility (SRC), and task conflict. Interestingly, these effects were in interaction with the number of colors, so that in small numbers, SSC and SRC were found, and in large numbers, SRC and task conflict were found. Moreover, the results suggest that our task includes two types of task conflict that are raised due to three different tasks: processing the meaning of the digit vs. estimating the number of colors and counting the number of colors vs. estimating the number of colors.

Zusammenfassung: Hintergrund: Ein Meilenstein in der Rechenentwicklung der zweiten Klasse Grundschule ist das Verständnis und Beherrschen des Zehnerübergangs. Der aktuelle Beitrag untersucht den Einfluss des arithmetischen Faktenwissens und des konzeptuellen arithmetischen Wissens auf die Beherrschung des Zehnerübergangs. Methode: An 158 Klassen oberösterreichischer Grundschulen (N = 2416 Kindern) wurden ab Mitte der ersten Klasse zu vier Testzeitpunkten arithmetische Kurztests durchgeführt. Die zeitverzögerten Zusammenhänge der einzelnen Komponenten untereinander und die Performanz beim Zehnerübergang in der zweiten Schulstufe wurden auf Basis unterschiedlicher Varianten des Cross-Lagged Panel Models (CLP-Modell) untersucht. Ergebnisse: Die Resultate des klassischen CLP-Modells zeigen einen positiven Zusammenhang zwischen den dem Faktenabruf und konzeptuellem Wissen der ersten Klasse sowie dem Zehnerübergang in der zweiten Klasse. Für das konzeptuelle Wissen können keine signifikanten Effekte auf den Zehnerübergang gezeigt werden. Unter Hinzunahme von (latenten) konfundierenden Variablen in das CLP-Modell sind die Effekte des Faktenabrufs auf den Zehnerübergang und/oder das konzeptuelle Wissen nicht mehr signifikant. Diskussion: Die Ergebnisse geben Anstoß für wichtige, aber empirisch noch weitgehend unbeantwortete Fragen zum kausalen Zusammenhang zwischen spezifischen arithmetischen Komponenten (Faktenabruf und konzeptuelles arithmetisches Wissen) einerseits und dem Zehnerübergang andererseits.