視覚から言語への情報変換能力と認知症重症度および記憶能力との関係

Relationship between the ability to translate visual information to linguistic information, and dementia and memory

要旨：本研究の目的は，視覚から言語への情報変換能力と認知症重症度および記憶能力との関係を検討することである．対象は高齢者50名，若年者10名とした．方法は2つの図形間の違いを言語表出させる課題を用い，違いの表出数，誤答数，見落とし数を情報変換能力と定義し，HDS-Rや記憶能力との関連について検討した．その結果，情報変換能力とHDS-Rや記憶課題に有意な相関関係を認めた．情報変換能力の評価は，情報処理の問題を臨床で簡便に検討することや評価と介入の整合性を高める手段となり得る可能性が考えられた．

　The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the evaluation of translation ability from visual information to linguistic information can be an avenue of assessing encoding in information processing. The participants were fifty elderly adults and ten young adults without visual defects. Each participant was asked to orally express the difference of two figures. The information translation ability was evaluated by the number of expressions used and the accuracy of the calculation. The correlation between the information translation ability, cognitive function and short term memory were examined by Spearman's rank correlation test. A statistically significant correlation was observed among the information translation ability, cognitive function and short term memory (p＜0.01). The results suggest that the evaluation of translation ability may reveal the problem of encoding which is based on the information processing model.