Theme: Technology

Project Description

Cognitive assessments are widely used to understand how people think, remember and process information. However, most assessments take place in highly controlled environments and use structured tasks that may not fully reflect how cognition is used in everyday life, where people often need to manage multiple demands, distractions and changing situations. This project will investigate how well performance on a digital cognitive assessment, UniCog, reflects cognition in more realistic everyday contexts. UniCog is a device-agnostic assessment designed to be completed on commonly available digital devices. It uses a non-verbal design to reduce the influence of language, literacy and cultural factors, with the aim of making cognitive assessment more accessible to diverse populations. The research will investigate whether performance on UniCog generalises to ecologically relevant cognitive activities that simulate selected demands of everyday life, and whether performance is associated with everyday functioning beyond what can be understood from conventional cognitive tests. By examining cognition across increasingly realistic contexts, this project aims to improve understanding of what digital cognitive assessments tell us about people’s everyday cognitive abilities and functioning. The findings could contribute to more meaningful approaches to cognitive assessment and help bridge the gap between performance measured in testing environments and cognition as it is used in everyday life.