Do Responses to Survey Questions Provide a Window into Cognitive Health?
by OMNI ADRD
Traditional cognitive tests have long been a mainstay of dementia research. These tests, typically administered by a researcher or clinician on pen-and-paper or via an interview, are widely used to measure changes in cognition.
Unfortunately, these tests tend to be burdensome for researchers and participants. Researchers may need specialized training to administer certain tests, and some tests require licensing fees. For participants, testing sessions are frequently time consuming and may require commuting to a research site.
To limit study costs and participant burden, researchers often administer cognitive tests only a few times over the course of a multiyear study–providing important snapshots of cognitive performance, but potentially missing changes occurring between testing sessions. This limits our understanding of how changes in cognition occur. Is someone’s cognitive performance changing gradually, fluctuating from day to day, or suddenly and sharply declining? With only a few assessments administered over several years, we cannot answer such questions.
Traditional cognitive tests have another important limitation: they may not fully reflect real-world changes in cognition, because they are designed to be administered under standardized conditions in a research lab.
Researchers like Dr. Stefan Schneider are investigating non-traditional ways to address these gaps, such as examining how participants interact with surveys. According to Dr. Schneider, these survey-based interactions “contain a largely untapped layer of information about cognitive functioning”.
Collecting Survey Cognitive Data
Dr. Schneider studies survey cognitive data collected via online surveys to determine whether these data provide insight into cognitive functioning. Survey cognitive data falls into two broad categories: how people interact with a survey question and how they respond to a survey question.
Survey interaction data (or paradata) captures how participants interact with a survey, including how long participants take to respond to each survey question.
Survey response data focuses more on the quality of someone’s answers, such as the level of detail, or whether they frequently respond “I don’t know” or skip questions.
Measuring Change with Survey Cognitive Data
Dr. Schneider and his team are using data from the Understanding America Study (UAS)—a nationally representative online panel—to study how survey cognitive data compares to data derived from traditional cognitive tests. They have found that participants’ response times correlate with their scores on traditional cognitive tests of processing speed and problem solving.
They have also found that survey response times can capture short-term changes in processing speed associated with recent experiences such as work strain, fatigue, stress, and COVID-19 infection. Further, they have been able to predict risk for accelerated cognitive decline using survey cognitive data.
Survey Cognitive Data in Early Prevention Research
With a better understanding of how survey cognitive data reflects cognitive change, researchers may be able to use online surveys to gather information about cognitive change more frequently and remotely. This approach could prove especially useful for Alzheimer’s prevention research, which often involves middle aged adults, who are often juggling multiple responsibilities and may lack the time for repeated lab visits. “We may be able to track cognitive changes more frequently and at much larger scale,” Dr. Schneider says, “without adding new tests or additional participant burden.”
Researchers can follow this link to learn more about the UAS Paradata Cognitive Functioning (P-Cog) file.
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