Examining the importance of literacy in neuropsychological research: Insights from Indian adults living in the community
Keywords:
Neuropsychological tests, Literacy, Cognitive impairment, Indigenous testAbstract
Background: Literacy is widely explored topic in cross cultural neuropsychology research. Indian culture is unique in terms of literacy and related cultural belief systems. There is paucity of research on Illiterate participants as majority of the Indian studies focus on educated participants including low and high educated participants with inadequate representation of illiterate participants.
Aim/ Objective: The main purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of literacy on neuropsychological test performance in an educationally diverse population.
Method: Total sample consisted of 140 healthy participants with heterogeneous educational backgrounds. Illiterate and literate participants between the age range from 18 to 50 years were selected in this study. They were screened using the Modified MINI Screen, HMSE and Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, and followed by detailed neuropsychological assessment.
Results: The results of this study revealed that the participants not having formal education or having less years of education performed poorly on tests of attention, construction ability, memory, phonemic fluency, naming and global cognitive screening (HMSE). On the other hand, participants having higher or more years of education performed better than them on similar tests. Literacy has a significant impact on neurocognitive functions and ability to read and write few words can enhance cognitive functioning. Further, results revealed that the impact of education on neuropsychological test performance is nonlinear.
Conclusion: The findings clearly demonstrates the role of literacy on Neurocognitive functions. Further considering education as proxy measure for level of literacy in Indian context might not be appropriate method especially in low educated participants. Therefore, there is urgent need to examine literacy related influence on cognition using contextualized approach and we recommend developing sensitive and culturally valid tools to assess neurocognitive functions for Indian participants.
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