Cognitive Ageing and Dementia Research Lab

Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to perform future activities, is a fundamental requirement for independent living. PM tasks pervade our daily lives, and PM failures represent one of the most prominent memory concerns across the entire life span. This research project aims to address this issue by exploring the potential benefits of specific encoding strategies on memory for intentions across healthy adulthood and in the early stages of cognitive impairment.

Patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), usually considered an early stage of Alzheimer's disease, have deficits not only in retrospective memory (RM), that is, recalling of past events, words or people, but also on prospective memory (PM), the cognitive ability of remembering to execute delayed intentions in the future. This research project aims to investigate whether patients with aMCI refer more PM complaints as compared with RM complaints, and whether this might depend upon short-term vs long-term items or time-based vs event-based tasks.

Remembering to perform future activities is a fundamental requirement for independent living. This includes tasks such as remembering to pick up the milk, where prospective memory (PM) failures may lead to inconvenience, but also tasks where failures can have serious and even life‐threatening consequences, such as remembering to take medication. It is therefore unsurprising that failures of PM are one of the most prominent memory concerns across the entire human lifespan. Measurement models of age differences in PM are very scarce and have generally failed to produce consistent results. This research project aims to establish a model that effectively explains the variance in objective measures of PM for both young and older adults where cognitive ability, complexity of the ongoing task and perceived cognitive efficiency might be mediators of the complex relationship between PM and age.

Professional caregivers often recognize, as part of their everyday practice, an eventual deterioration in relationships between themselves as professional caregivers and the residents, but also between the residents and their family members and among residents themselves. Importantly, understanding patients’ behaviour and behavioural change has consistently been identified as a crucial factor to achieve and sustain good relationships between professionals and residents suffering with dementia. This research project aims to explore the impact that changes in behavioural symptoms of people living with dementia have on professional caregiver and resident relationships