Evaluation of the Context-Based Prospective Memory (CBPM) task in neurotypical middle-aged and older adults: psychometric properties and sensitivity to age-related cognitive changes.
Siri Vikram, Sharon Ashley, Gagan Bajaj and 1 others
PMID 42018808WHAT IT FOUND
A new shopping-mall memory test gave consistent scores when repeated and when rated by two assessors, and flagged the same problems as an established memory test.
Middle-aged and older adults scored lower than younger adults, but not differently from each other.
Key findings
01The task was reliable in this sample: its six subscales hung together (alpha 0.875 in middle-aged adults, 0.715 in older adults), repeat testing two weeks apart produced closely agreeing totals (ICC 0.931 and 0.813) and two independent raters agreed closely (0.917 and 0.846).
02Scores tracked the established MIST: the proportion of high and low performers did not differ between the two tests (p = 0.439 in middle-aged adults, p = 0.127 in older adults) and error totals correlated strongly (rho = 0.937 in older adults, 0.919 in middle-aged adults).
03Prospective memory total scores differed across the three age groups (p < 0.001): young adults scored higher than both middle-aged and older adults (p < 0.001 for each), but middle-aged and older adults did not differ significantly from each other (p = 0.28).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Everyone tested was healthy and cognitively intact, so the study says nothing about how the task performs in the populations the authors want to use it in next, such as mild cognitive impairment or dementia. All participants had at least 12th standard education, high English proficiency and a middle socioeconomic background, so the scores cannot be applied to people with other educational or socioeconomic profiles. Test-retest and inter-rater reliability were calculated on just 16 people, 8 in each age group, which makes those figures imprecise: the interval around the older adults' repeat-testing agreement runs from 0.36 to 0.95. The comparison with young adults uses data from an earlier study by the same authors rather than a group tested alongside these participants, and the original young adult data is not described in this paper. The task is still being developed and is available only on request from the corresponding author for research use, so a clinician has no published scores to compare a patient against. The paper reports many correlations between individual trials and subscales, and the two trials that did not correlate as expected are described as exceptions rather than examined further.
Declared interests
The paper states only that there is nothing to declare on financial support, and gives no other declaration. The task being validated was developed by the same research group, and is available from the corresponding author on request.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat this as a test you can start using with patients. It was validated only in healthy adults with at least 12th standard education and strong English, and the authors state it is currently available for research only and cannot yet indicate how severe a memory problem is in people with cognitive-communication disorders. It also did not separate middle-aged from older adults as a group, so a score difference between those two age bands is not something you can act on.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →