Protocol for the conceptualization and evaluation of a screening-tool for fitness-to-drive assessment in older people with cognitive impairment.

Introduction: Due to aging and health status people may be subjected to a decrease of cognitive ability and subsequently also a decline of driving safety. On the other hand there is a lack of valid and economically applicable instruments to assess driving performance.

Objective: The study is designed to develop a valid screening-tool for fitness-to-drive assessment in older people with cognitive impairment externally validated on the basis of on-road driving performance.

Applying Psycholinguistic Evidence to the Construction of a New Test of Verbal Memory in Late-Life Cognitive Decline: The Auditory Wordlist Learning Test.

The construction of the German Auditory Wordlist Learning Test (AWLT) for the assessment of verbal memory in late-life cognitive decline was guided by psycholinguistic evidence, which indicates that a word's linguistic characteristics influence its probability of being learned and recalled. The AWLT includes four trials of learning, short and long delayed free recall, and a recognition task. Its words were selected with taking into account their semantic content, orthographic length, frequency in the language, and orthographic neighborhood size (the number of words derived by adding, subtracting, or replacing a single letter at a time).

In the white cube: museum context enhances the valuation and memory of art.

Art museum attendance is rising steadily, unchallenged by online alternatives. However, the psychological value of the real museum experience remains unclear because the experience of art in the museum and other contexts has not been compared. Here we examined the appreciation and memory of an art exhibition when viewed in a museum or as a computer simulated version in the laboratory.

Art in time and space: context modulates the relation between art experience and viewing time.

The experience of art emerges from the interaction of various cognitive and affective processes. The unfolding of these processes in time and their relation with viewing behavior, however, is still poorly understood. Here we examined the effect of context on the relation between the experience of art and viewing time, the most basic indicator of viewing behavior.

What makes an art expert? Emotion and evaluation in art appreciation.

Why do some people like negative, or even disgusting and provocative artworks? Art expertise, believed to influence the interplay among cognitive and emotional processing underlying aesthetic experience, could be the answer. We studied how art expertise modulates the effect of positive-and negative-valenced artworks on aesthetic and emotional responses, measured with self-reports and facial electromyography (EMG). Unsurprisingly, emotionally-valenced art evoked coherent valence as well as corrugator supercilii and zygamoticus major activations.