Entwicklungsdiagnostik im Alter Wie kann man unauffällige kognitive Leistungen von pathologischen unterscheiden?

An approach for the developmental psychological assessment of aging which is able to differentiate normal cognitive aging from pathological cognitive decline is presented.Aregression based approach by Zachary and Gorsuch (1985) was adopted. The analyses were based on data from a multi-center study of N=349 cognitively healthy elderly, aged between 60 and 90 years. Subjects were tested with the SKT (Erzigkeit, 1989), a test for the assessment of attention and memory, and two subtests from the German adaptation of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV; Petermann, 2012), the matrix reasoning and the vocabulary subtest. Surprisingly, for the matrix reasoning subtest as well as for the vocabulary subtest, a significant cognitive decline depending on age emerged. All cognitive achievements were significantly correlated with attention, and also, but to a lesser degree, with memory. The results of the regression based approach suggested a valuable contribution to the developmental psychological assessment of aging.