Exacting assessments: do older adults fatigue more quickly?

To determine whether neuropsychological testing is fatiguing, and whether it is more fatiguing to older than younger adults, 351 healthy, community living adults, between 18 and 91 years of age, completed a 3 to 4 hour battery of tests focusing on sensation, perception, attention, memory and knowledge. The battery included 3 critical tests: one for assessing the speed of making simple reactions and two for assessing the speed of making decisions. For half of the participants, the critical tests were administered only once, at the end of the session; for the remaining participants, the critical tests were given at the beginning and end of the session. The results show no evidence of fatigue effects with participants from any age group. In view of the type and variety of instruments in our battery, we believe our results will generalize to a wide range of testing situations. The participants in our study were healthy adult volunteers, however, and thus we recommend caution in generalizing the results to clinical populations.