Clinical validation of an aggregate learning ratio from the neuropsychological assessment battery.

Quantifying learning deficits provides valuable information in identifying and diagnosing mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Previous research has found that a learning ratio (LR) metric, derived from the list learning test from the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB), was able to distinguish between those with normal cognition versus memory impairment. The current study furthers the NAB LR research by validating a NAB story LR, as well as an aggregate LR.

Novel learning ratio from the NAB list learning test distinguishes between clinical groups: clinical validation and sex-related differences.

List-learning tasks provide a wealth of information about an individual's cognitive abilities: attention, encoding, storage, retrieval, recognition. A more recently developed metric, the Learning Ratio (LR), supplements information about cognitive ability and can assist the clinician in determining whether an individual has cognitive impairment. The LR is calculated by taking the difference between the individuals' raw score on the first learning trial and their raw score on the last learning trial, which is then divided by the number of words left to be learned after the first learning trial.