Wednesday, January 23, 2008
A group of Kansas representatives were given the opportunity to test their ability to do two things at once yesterday evening during a research tour of the KU Life Span Institute.
The 16 legislators visited the Institute, housed in the Dole Center, to create awareness of and to better understand the research KU professors and students complete there.
The representatives traveled to five tour stops at the Institute. At one of the stops, several legislators were challenged to answer simple questions while tracking a dot on a computer screen with a cursor.
Mabel Rice, Distinguished Professor, gives a presentation of the EEG machine which measures brain activity. Twenty five state legislators were in attendance for the presentation.
The test, called dual task performance, was developed by Susan Kemper, senior scientist at the Gerontology Center at the Institute. She said the test was used to examine how aging affected people’s ability to complete more than one task at a time.
Shaylan Oberle, research assistant and 2007 KU graduate, said the test measured what percent of the time the user was on target and recorded his or her speech so it could be analyzed. She said the test, given to KU students and members of the Lawrence community, compared results from people ages 18 to 30 to people 60 and older.
Oberle said the purpose of the test was to set norms for people as they age. Oberle said the research had been conducted at the Institute for two and a half years and that more than 300 people had been tested, but the research was not complete.
Oberle also said the dual task performance test was a safe way to test people’s abilities to do more than one thing at a time, such as driving and talking on a cell phone or talking to someone while writing.
The legislators took a shorter version of the test than what actual participants would take.
Kemper told the legislators that more tests like hers were needed so that diseases such as Alzheimer’s could be detected earlier in the rapidly growing senior citizen population. Kemper used the Nintendo Wii system, which she said was very popular in assisted-living homes, as a comical, but real life example of when people practice cognitive, physical and social stimulation all at once.
Rep. Kay Wolf, R-Prairie Village, said the tour was her first visit to the Life Span Institute, which opened in 1960. She said she would like to return in the future for a more in depth tour. She said the state of Kansas and the nation needed to evaluate more research like that of the Institute’s because people’s life spans are so much longer than they were in the past.
“I am very proud to have a facility like this in Kansas,” Wolf said. “There is a host of things that will affect all of us that this research could help to prevent.”
Wolf specifically said that she hoped researchers could find a way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease so that those who would potentially be affected by the disease could live a longer and more productive life.
Other stops on the tour included a booth on the correlation between Alzheimer’s and weight-loss and a demonstration of the Institute’s Electroencephalography system, or EEG. The EEG system, which consists of 128 electrodes that are attached to the user’s head, is used at the Institute to determine how a child with a language impairment is different from a child without an impairment.
— Edited by Madeline Hyden
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