SSRI Seminar – Jon Hakun

"Ambulatory Assessments for Cognitive and Brain Health"

Abstract: The ability to sensitively detect changes in cognition at multiple timescales is essential to a wide range of disciplines including human development and aging, neuroepidemiology, public health, behavioral medicine, and the clinical and biomedical sciences. A central problem faced by investigators who depend on longitudinal cognitive outcomes is that the brain can be a bit of a moving target, subject to a wide range of physiological and contextual factors and adapting quickly to the tests used to measure its functioning. Over the past several years our team has been involved in the development of digital tools that directly take on short- and longer-term variation in cognition as a feature of interest in view of generating new insights into healthy cognitive aging, risk for advanced cognitive decline, and dementia prevention. These tools include ecological momentary assessments, ultra-brief performance-based cognitive assessments, and wearable devices (e.g. activity monitors and fitness watches) that help richly characterize cognition, experience, and behavior over the course of participants’ daily lives. While each technique generates high resolution data useful for a wide range of research questions, combining these intensive data streams to understand cognition as it is situated in everyday contexts may hold the potential to make the greatest theoretical and applied impact. I’ll review a wide range of basic and applied research conducted by our team using these tools and highlight efforts by the Penn State Geroscience and Dementia Prevention Consortium to support broader collaboration using this approach.