Publications by authors named "Alec C Neale"
Task-Based Attentional Control: The Role of Anxiety and Age.
Arch Clin Neuropsychol
September 2024
Objective: Attentional Control Theory (ACT) posits that anxiety impacts cognitive functioning through interference in working memory and processing efficiency, resulting in performance deficits in set-shifting and inhibition. Few studies have examined the effects of anxiety on set-shifting and inhibition in clinical samples or how these relationships might be affected by age. The current study tested whether increased age, elevated anxiety, and their interaction were associated with reduced performance on measures of set-shifting and inhibition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-reported histories of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms are prevalent among post-9/11 veterans. Both are associated with subjective and often overlapping symptom complaints, but variably with objective neuropsychological test performances. These outcomes are seldom explored in relation to lifetime mTBI burden.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- This study explored different methods for categorizing the validity of performance validity tests (PVTs) in clinical settings, focusing on how to handle patients who fail one test.
- Researchers analyzed a group of 157 patients using both freestanding and embedded PVTs, comparing several classification approaches to determine their effectiveness.
- Findings indicated that excluding patients who failed one PVT or classifying them as valid led to better accuracy in results than including them in the invalid group, suggesting that the choice of method should align with the research goals.
Objective: This study cross-validated the word choice test (WCT) in a diverse neuropsychiatric sample and examined the effect of increasing verbal memory impairment severity on WCT performance.
Method: Data from 147 clinically referred patients (113 valid/34 invalid) who completed the WCT, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), and four independent criterion PVTs were analyzed. RAVLT memory impairment bands used were: ≥37T (normal memory); 30T-36T (below average scores/mild impairment); and ≤29T (extremely low scores/severe impairment).