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Older Adults With Cognitive Impairment Can Correct COVID‐19 Health‐Related Misconceptions

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT Background Misconceptions are a major cause of poor health through adverse health‐related decisions and behavior, yet common techniques to refute these beliefs may be ineffective for older adults and/or difficult to implement. Based on well‐established methods from cognitive science, we tested the short‐ and long‐term effectiveness of a simple learning method to dispel misconceptions related to COVID‐19 in older adults with and without cognitive impairment. Methods Participants rated COVID‐19 misconceptions as either true/false or yes/no, remotely during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Immediately following the pretest of misconceptions, participants received feedback about their responses consisting of the knowledge statement, their answer, the correct answer, and an explanation of the correct answer. A surprise retest of the same statements occurred after 30 min and then again after 1 week. Additional measures including cognitive testing, self‐reported mood, and variables related to COVID‐19 (e.g., vaccine hesitancy) were also given. Older adults were categorized into two groups (i.e., healthy, impaired) based on recommended cutoffs from a cognitive screener, the MoCA‐Blind. Results Older adults with cognitive impairment ( N = 32) were less knowledgeable about common COVID‐19 misconceptions. Despite initial knowledge deficits, older adults with impairment demonstrated equivalent gains on the retests, compared to healthy older adults ( N = 31), which was supported by moderate evidence. Groups made significant knowledge gains on the 30 min retest ( d = 0.71), and these gains persisted over 1 week. Knowledge updating was not impacted by personal experience with COVID‐19 or general vaccine hesitancy. Conclusions We demonstrated that a simple learning method can lead to persistent knowledge gains in even older adults with demonstrated cognitive deficits. Adding these novel results to the existing literature suggests that “myth‐busting” may be an effective learning technique for people with a range of ages, cognitive abilities, experiences, and beliefs.

Source: Health Science Reports

DOI: 10.1002/hsr2.71519