Biomedical subjects

Tina Iachini

Publications and source records attributed to Tina Iachini.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Coping strategies and cognitive functioning in elderly people from a rural community in Italy.

Stressful situations may contribute to pathological states in elderly people facing harmful events. This study investigated the relationships between adopting appropriate coping strategies, transforming circumstances to personal preferences or adjusting personal preferences to situational constraints, and the efficiency of cognitive functioning in an elderly sample of 121 residents drawn from a rural community in southern Italy. They were administered the Mini-Mental State Examination, the Tenacious Goal Pursuit, Flexible Goal Adjustment, and Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations. Intercorrelations of scores suggested that facing stressful situations is somewhat associated with efficient cognitive functioning and coping strategies that ensure a wide range of solutions.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed2005

Age differences in mental scanning of locomotor maps.

PURPOSE: To investigate whether the metric quality of mental spatial representations of the environment changes with aging, by means of mental scanning of locomotor space. METHOD: Twenty young adults (age 21.1-30.8) and 20 old adults (age 60.4-76.4) were submitted to a battery of psychometric tests to assess the effects of aging on general cognitive functions and specific visuo-spatial abilities, and to determine which cognitive factors correlated with scanning performance. The mental scanning task followed. Participants firstly had to learn a path comprising six positions by walking and observing these; secondly, they had to use mental imagery to scan from a first to a second position, according to different distances. RESULTS: Aging reduces the validity of the metric information incorporated by mental spatial representations. Attentional and working memory resources, ability to manipulate spatial information and a general factor of abstract visuo-spatial reasoning strongly correlated with scanning performance. Finally, aging seemed to have a selective effect on cognitive functioning. CONCLUSIONS: Age differences emerge when demanding storage and processing of information are simultaneously required, as predicted by the Limited Resources view of aged cognition.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Gender differences in object location memory in a real three-dimensional environment.

In this preliminary study we investigate gender differences in object location memory. Our purpose is to extend the results about object location memory obtained in laboratory settings to a real 3-D environment and to further distinguish the specific components involved in this kind of memory by considering the strategies adopted to perform the task. To do this, we join the three-level model of spatial representations (landmark, route, and survey) proposed by Siegel and White (1975) with the three subcomponents of spatial memory (what, where, and what + where) identified by Postma and De Haan (1996). We adopted the object relocation task devised by Postma and De Haan (1996), adapted to a real environment. Seven common objects were placed on the floor of a cylindrical room. Sixty-four males and 64 females were asked to memorize the spatial layout. Next, the experimenter moved the objects to a different position along with seven new objects and the participants had to relocate the original objects to their initial positions. In line with Postma, Izendoorn, and De Haan (1998), we found no gender difference in object recognition, and in recalling absolute distance and categorical spatial relations; however males were better than females in recalling the distance between objects and the size of the layout. Overall, the data show a male advantage in some components of spatial cognition closely linked to the encoding of the metric structure of the spatial relationships at both route and survey level.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Do panic-agoraphobics overestimate distances?

Twenty-five subjects suffering from Panic Disorder with agoraphobia (PDA) and 25 normal controls (NC) were asked to estimate distances of familiar places of their town and non-distance stimuli. PDA subjects also completed the Mobility Inventory for Agoraphobia (MIA). Subjects with PDA significantly overestimated distances as compared to NC, whereas no significant difference was found on estimates of non-distance stimuli. Within the PDA group, significant correlations were found between distance estimates and subsets of MIA concerning the ways of moving through the environment. Although with caution, given the small sample size and the preliminary character of this study, the results could be interpreted as consistent with a cognitive dysfunction associated with PDA, probably at the level of representational mechanisms of the extrapersonal space.

Adult↗