Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

As the Canadian population continues to grow older, aging research has shifted towards the increasing prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD), one of the more debilitating neurodegenerative disorders. A vast number of studies looking at older adult cognition has shown promising signs of using different cognitive interventions to improve memory functioning; however, these interventions are often lengthy and impractical for that age group. One subpopulation of older adults that may also benefit from memory training is individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Individuals with aMCI show gradual difficulty in retrieving autobiographical memory (AM) for past, personal events and facts, and they have a much greater risk of being diagnosed with AD. A recent study with younger adults involving a demanding working memory training task, where the recollection of real-world scenes and their positions was tested, showed improvements in episodic memory (EM) functioning. Given that EM serves a role in remembering past events, this study will investigate the efficacy of the training task on EM in aMCI and older adult populations, and, ultimately, whether this transfers to AM. It is believed that through the course of a four week training regimen, aMCI patients and healthy older adults trained on this task will show marked improvement to their EM, compared to groups of patients and healthy older adults provided with a less demanding task. Accordingly, it is predicted that AM will also show improvement from pre-training to post-training for the training groups. Such findings are crucial in reducing the need for burdensome tests when looking at age-related impairments, which can then lead to tools that can examine the onset of AD better.