An Experimental Study of Learning and “Memory Function” in Elderly Psychiatric Patients

Abstract

A paper by Shapiro, Post, Lofving, and Inglis (12) has reported on the relationship of certain aspects of mental functioning to the psychiatric illnesses of old age. This study confirmed that performance on some tasks which appeared to involve “memory function” is relatively more impaired in elderly patients with organic brain pathology than in elderly patients with functional psychiatric disorders. It was also shown, however, that the difference between functional and organic groups on these memory tests was not as great as might be expected on the basis of the commonly held psychiatric hypothesis that memory disorder is one of the leading features of early cerebral involvement in old age. The relatively poorer performance on these memory tests of the organic patients could not be accounted for in terms of, for example, lower intelligence, since the memory tests produced significant differences between the organic and functional groups whereas the intelligence tests did not. A process of correlational analysis (Inglis, Shapiro, and Post (8)) showed that these tests did seem to have some psychological function in common which could usefully be labelled “memory”.