Date of Award

8-24-1988

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Abstract

The effects of a vasopressin analogue, desmopressin acetate (DDAVP) upon cognitive functioning performance was investigated in this study. Forty male and forty female college students were first assessed using the Vocabulary and the Block Design subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) to determine their verbal and spatial-visualization ability levels. Then they were treated intranasally with either DDVAP (60 ug), or an equal volume of saline. Finally, subjects were tested using these cognitive measures: The Paper Folding Test, the Stroop Color and Word Test and twelve lists of semantically unrelated words.Analyses of variance of the test data identified several complex interactions for the immediate recall performance of the verbal task. Further, analyses of the strategies employed for the recall of the word lists also found a significant complex interaction with both treatment and gender. These complex findings have suggested that for the semantically unrelated word lists, treatment with DDAVP seemed to inhibit immediate recall performance. A likely explanation appears to be related to the meaningfulness of the verbal task. That is, other studies have found that DDAVP has facilitated recall performance of narrative prose and of implicational sentences. The verbal task of the present project required subjects to recall words which were unrelated, not meaningfully connected as were the implicational sentences or the narrative prose tasks.Further, it was hypothesized that treatment with DDAVP would enhance performance on the Paper Folding Test (the spatial-visualization measure). However, that this was not found seems to be related to a probable "ceiling effect."It was also hypothesized that subjects treated with DDAVP would show enhanced performance on the Stroop Color and Word Test (the verbal-processing interference task). However, there were no differences found for subjects' performance on the Interference subtest of this measure, as was anticipated. It seems likely that although DDAVP has been shown to enhance performance on other attentional measures (e.g., Sternberg Item Recognition Task), the differences between those tasks and the Stroop Color and Word Test was such that no change in performance was found.

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