OBJECTIVE To analyze the relationship between social word use in autobiographies and longevity. Although there is substantial evidence that our social relationships are associated with mortality, interpretation of this work is weakened by the limitations of assessing the social environment with structured questionnaires and interviews. By analyzing the word content of autobiographies, we could ...

Findings from the Nun Study indicate that low linguistic ability in early life has a strong association with dementia and premature death in late life. In the present study, we investigated the relationship of linguistic ability in early life to the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease and cerebrovascular disease. The analyses were done on a subset of 74 participants in the Nun Study for whom ...

This paper presents one part of a broad research project entitled 'Activity-Based Information Retrieval' (AIR) which is being carried out at EuroPARC. The basic hypothesis of this project is that if contextual data about human activities can be automatically captured and later presented as recognisable descriptions of past episodes, then human memory of those past episodes can be improved. This...

OBJECTIVE To determine if linguistic ability in early life is associated with cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life. DESIGN Two measures of linguistic ability in early life, idea density and grammatical complexity, were derived from autobiographies written at a mean age of 22 years. Approximately 58 years later, the women who wrote these autobiographies participated in an as...

Design.Two measures of linguistic ability in early life, idea density and grammatical complexity, were derived from autobiographies written at a mean age of 22 years. Approximately 58 years later, the women who wrote these autobiographies participated in an assessment of cognitive function, and those who subsequently died were evaluated neuropathologically. Setting.-Convents in the United State...

Prosopagnosia is a selective impairment of the visual learning and recognition of faces. The congenital type, which is not accompanied by detectable brain damage or malformation, was recently found to be far more common than previously known. Therefore, one should expect that at least a few biographies or autobiographies would reveal a prosopagnosia. In this paper we present an autobiography an...