After one day, all volunteers performed equally well when asked to listen to and later recall paragraphs of text containing about 90 separate pieces of information.
In an account that has gained its force from our being deep inside the head of the central character, it feels difficult to move on to accepting the narrative convention that we talk in paragraphs and can recall the paragraphs of those around us.
In one of those classic tales recalling the opening paragraphs of an old-school, dime-store pulp novel, del Sol's parents met while her mom was on a break from UC Berkeley and her dad was on the run from the police.
On a recent afternoon, when I met him at his office at Columbia, he recalled the last paragraph of his 2014 article.
Control subjects had no signs or symptoms of cognitive decline or neurologic disease including epilepsy; all subjects had a MMSE score between 28 and 30; a CDR score of 0; and NYU paragraph recall scores (immediate and delayed) >6.
Word lists and story or paragraph recall were the most common domain-specific outcome measures.
Previous studies have shown that episodic memory tests such as paragraph recall are sensitive to MCI and very early cognitive impairment in older adults [ 8].
A number of cognitive tests have been proposed that may be useful for identifying objective episodic memory impairment in MCI, specifically measures that assess both immediate and delayed recall, such as word-list learning or paragraph recall [ 1, 4].
Major inclusion criteria included a global Clinical Dementia Rating score of 0.5, with a memory score ≥0.5 and a delayed recall score ≤10 on the New York University paragraph recall test [ 23, 24].
In contrast to the Spatial Pattern Separation task, a standard paragraph recall test that is sensitive to the MCI stage of AD [ 56] was not sensitive to these biomarker correlates of preclinical AD.
For example, Rozzini et al 2007 found relative ESs that ranged from ES =.82 to ES =.99 based on story recall [ 11], whilst a study of memory strategy training based on paragraph recall failed to find positive training effects (ES = -.03 to ES = -.54 [ 36]).
