[Usefulness of reaction times in high-cortical recognition tasks]

We compared reaction times for high-cortical recognition tasks with kana-searching test in a group of 46 normal individuals aged 21 to 83 who gain a full score in Mini-Mental State. The following tasks of reaction time were used; simple reaction time (SRT), choice reaction time (CRT), memory scanning time (MST), and visual searching time (VST). The results were consistent and demonstrated that mean reaction time of 46 individuals increased in difficult tasks such as MST or VST. All reaction times increased depending on aging, which became longer in difficult tasks. Score of kana-searching test was correlated with MST and VST, but did not correlate with SRT and CRT. These findings suggest that reaction times may be useful for mass-screening of high-cortical functions in different ages as well as the kana-searching test.