The prevalence of dementia due to Alzheimer?s Disease (AD) and Alzheimer?s Disease Related Disorders (ADRD) increases with advancing age. However, the ability to disambiguate cognitive decline due to typical aging from the earliest stages of AD and ADRD is challenging. In part, we are hampered by a lack of sensitive assessment tools across the adult lifespan that can be easily and widely deployed within diverse research settings and populations. The MobileToolbox program was established to develop new measures of cognition and distribute them to the broad research community using mobile devices. The MobileToolbox is on schedule to develop a resource that makes it as easy as possible for a clinical researcher to select assessments and develop a study protocol appropriate for his or her study population and research questions. All of Us and the NIMH intramural and extramural programs require measurement tools of NIH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) constructs that are both scientifically valid, practically feasible and relevant to cognitive aging research. This supplement seeks to add 3-4 RDoC construct measures developed by the NIMH CNTRACs Consortium to the MobileToolbox. The following measures have been proposed: 1) Dot Probe Expectancy task (DPX) to assess cognitive control and goal maintenance; 2) Change Localization (CL)/detection tasks of working memory capacity; two remaining tasks may be able to differentiate cognitive decline associated with AD/ADRD vs from that associated with psychosis: 3) Jittered Orientation Visual Integration task (JOVI); and, 4) The Relational and Item-Specific Encoding (RiSE) test of Episodic Memory. Upon completion of this supplement, these measures will be available for use in both the general population and various AD/ADRD research samples.
Cognitive decline can occur as part of normal aging or because of pathogical processes such as dementia. This project will develop a set of app-based validated cognitive assessment tools, the MobileToolbox, to help identify normal from abnormal cognitive change in adults aged 20 to 85. The MobileToolbox will be appropriate for remote smartphone administration. Having such a resource will further our understanding of risk factors for and precursors of pathological cognitive decline and facilitate the development of effective prevention and treatment strategies.
