“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” What Everyone Is Missing About Cognitive Testing
The words matter, and these words are problematic
Our President has repeatedly told reporters over the last week about his performance on a cognitive test normally given when doctors suspect dementia or another form of cognitive dysfunction. As a pediatrician, I rarely use this particular test, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. But I frequently administer the SCAT-3, a test for concussions, which operates on the same principles.
A common feature of these instruments evaluates memory: both immediate and middle-term recall. Pathways from the auditory nerve through Wernicke’s area (the part of the brain that interprets speech) through the hippocampus take the sounds we hear and deposit them in memory. The trip from short-term to middle-term memory follows an additional pathway.
Immediate, or “working” memory, stores the last few seconds of input and is critical to intelligence. For example, I cannot write this article if the last sentence I scribed doesn’t hang in my mind for a few moments. Medium-term memory parks the most salient points for up to 30 minutes, after which they’ll be scrapped or moved to long-term memory for retrieval if they seem especially important.
