The Standard Older Adult Cognitive Battery (SOACB) is a tablet-based battery of cognitive tests developed by the UCR Brain Game Center. Large images and fonts make the battery appropriate for older adults or those with vision loss. The battery is available in BGC Science.
Interested in testing the battery? The UCR Brain Game Center provides free-to-use server codes for individuals interested in playing through a demo. Once you have downloaded our BGC Science application from your mobile device's App Store or PlayStore, please use the following server code to set up your account and begin downloading our battery's stimuli: moacbtest. Instructions on how to configure server codes can be found here.
The word list learning and complex figure drawing tasks are intertwined with each other. The participant is first shown a list of ten words to remember. Then, they are asked to draw a copy of a complex figure. After drawing the complex figure, participants are shown twenty words, some of which are from the list presented at the beginning of the task and some of which are not. They must indicate if they recognize the word or not by pressing the “yes” or “no” button. After, they are asked to draw the figure that they copied from memory. Finally, they are asked to do a free recall of the words. For the word list learning task, there are three word lists, each containing 10 words (Rey, 1964). For constructional praxis, there are three complex figures (newly designed by Seitz, Jaeggi, and Pahor) that are presented after each word list recall. Therefore, the participants go through the procedure described above a total of three times. The complex figure task was modeled after RBANS Figure Copy (RBANS; Randolph, 1998) and The Rey–Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) test (Rey, 1941; Osterrieth, 1944).
The Boston Naming task is a measure of confrontation naming that can be used for screening for mild word-retrieval problems that may occur in cases of dementia or in cases of children with developmental speech problems (LaBarge, Edwards, & Knesevich, 1986; Kaplan et al., 1978). The participant is shown a series of pictures. After each picture is shown, the participant must provide the name of the object shown in the picture and an audio recording of their voice is acquired. The SOACB version of Boston Naming contains 23 items drawn by Brain Game Center artists. The set consists of 15 items used in the CERAD version of the Boston Naming Test (Morris et al., 1989) and 8 items used in the original and/or other revised versions of the test (Williams, Mack, & Henderson, 1989; Mack, Freed, Williams, & Henderson, 1992; Graves et al., 2010). The pictures used in the task were drawn by Brain Game Center artists. The main outcome measure is accuracy.
The Shipley-2 task is a measure of crystallized knowledge (Shipley et al., 2009). There are 40 multiple-choice items and participants are asked to select the one word out of four choices that is closest in meaning to a target word. The main outcome measure is accuracy.
The Trail Making Task (TNT) is a measure of visual attention and task switching ability and was originally developed to assess cognitive deficits associated with brain injury (Reitan, 1955). It consists of two parts where participants must connect a series of circles as quickly and accurately as possible. In part A, participants must connect circles numbered 1-25 in numerical order. In part B, participants must switch between connecting a number with a letter. The outcome measures are response time and accuracy.
UCMRT-D is a measure of abstract problem solving with 3 alternate forms that is targeted towards older adults. It was developed as an additional set of problems to complement the original UCMRT test (Pahor et al., 2018) which targets college students and other high-ability populations. In set D, problems that contain very small visuals or showed low overall accuracy were removed. UCMRT-D consists of 18 test problems that need to be solved within 10 minutes. During practice, participants receive feedback (correct/incorrect) along with an explicit explanation of the rules that must be combined to solve the problem. No feedback is provided during the test, but participants can change their answer, skip problems, and navigate back and forth between the problems, akin to paper and pencil versions of Raven’s Matrices. The main outcome measure is accuracy.
Graves, R. E., Bezeau, S. C., Fogarty, J., & Blair, R. (2004). Boston naming test short forms: a comparison of previous forms with new item response theory based forms. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 26(7), 891-902.
LaBarge, E., Edwards, D., & Knesevich, J. W. (1986). Performance of normal elderly on the Boston Naming Test. Brain and language, 27(2), 380-384.
Mack, W. J., Freed, D. M., Williams, B. W., & Henderson, V. W. (1992). Boston Naming Test: shortened versions for use in Alzheimer's disease. Journal of gerontology, 47(3), P154-P158.
Morris, J. C., Heyman, A., Mohs, R. C., Hughes, J. P., van Belle, G., Fillenbaum, G. D. M. E., ... & Clark, C. (1989). The Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD). Part I. Clinical and neuropsychological assessment of Alzheimer's disease. Neurology, 39(9), 1159-1165
Osterrieth, P.A. (1944). Le test de copie d’une figure complexe; contribution à l’étude de la perception et de la mémoire. Test of copying a complex figure; contribution to the study of perception and memory. Arch Psychol. 30:206–356
Pahor, A., Stavropoulos, T., Jaeggi, S. M., & Seitz, A. R. (2019). Validation of a matrix reasoning task for mobile devices. Behavior research methods, 51(5), 2256-2267.
Randolph, C. (1998). Repeatable battery for the assessment of neuropsychological status manual. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation
Reitan, R. M. (1955). The relation of the trail making test to organic brain damage. Journal of Consulting Psychology
Rey, A. (1941). L’examen psychologique dans les cas d’encéphalopathie traumatique. The psychological examination in cases of traumatic encepholopathy. Problems. Arch Psychol. 28:215–85.
Rey , A. 1964 . L'examen clinique en psychologie, Paris: Presses universitaires de France
Shipley, W. C., Gruber, C. P., Martin, T. A., & Klein, A. M. (2009). Shipley-2. Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services.
Williams, B. W., Mack, W., & Henderson, V. W. (1989). Boston naming test in Alzheimer's disease. Neuropsychologia, 27(8), 1073-1079.
