Ecological measures of cognitive functioning: a validation study

Observed cognitive decline in the elderly has been widely reported in the literature. The relation of experimental cognitive ability measures to real-world cognitive competence has been questioned. This research examines the validity of English-language versions of two measures of everyday competency: the Memory in Reality test involving object placement recall and the Coin Test, a money-sorting task. The measures were developed as part of a Swedish epidemiologic study. Validity was evaluated by comparison of these tasks with standard cognitive tests and with a measure of metamemory. It was expected that the ecological measures would have a stronger association with metamemory than the standard tests. Subjects were 93 community-dwelling women, aged 75 and older. The ecological tasks correlated positively with the standard tests, but there were inconsistent relations of both standard and ecological measures with metamemory. The results partly support use of these measures for evaluating everyday functioning.