Cognitive Plasticity in Healthy, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) Subjects and Alzheimer's Disease Patients: A Research Project in Spain

Cognitive plasticity, learning potential, and rehabilitation potential are new constructs, which are understood as expressions of neural plasticity. They are assessed through dynamic assessment (or testing-the-limits), using experimental test-training-posttest, a form of evaluation closely related to functional or stress testing in medicine. This research strategy has been used for increasing knowledge about several target populations with intellectual handicaps (socially mentally retarded, brain-impaired, schizophrenia patients, etc.), including older people whose fluid intellectual capacity has declined. Recently, cognitive plasticity has been applied to the study of dementia ( Baltes & Baltes, 1997 ), but there are very few other studies in this area. The basic objective of this research program is to test the extent to which learning potential can be a predictor of the course of dementia. The first specific objective of the research is to test whether learning can discriminate healthy people from those diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and with Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In order to assess cognitive plasticity, a Battery of Learning Potential for Assessing Dementia (BEPAD) was developed, incorporating four tests for assessing visuo-spatial and verbal memory, executive function, and verbal fluency. Two hundred subjects participated in the study: 100 healthy elderly, 50 diagnosed with MCI and 50 with AD. All learning strategies included in the four tests making up the BEPAD appear to be effective: All three groups improved their performance in visual memory, verbal learning, and executive function.