COVID-19 infection does not seem to affect cognition in college students 2023 Francis and Thunell

Highlights

• There are concerns about long-term effects of COVID-19 infection on cognition.
• During the pandemic students participated in classic cognitive psychology experiments.
• There is little difference in cognitive ability for infected and uninfected students.

Abstract

Emerging evidence indicates that COVID-19 damages the central nervous system and thereby might engender long-term cognitive impairment. Self-reports and some measures of cognitive ability suggest that long COVID can lead to substantial and frightening detriments in cognition. To further explore this issue, we used data from university courses on cognitive psychology where students participated in classic experiments that measure various aspects of cognition. Across 24 experiments we compared cognitive performance of students who had contracted COVID-19 against those who were uninfected. Using Bayes Factor analyses, we assessed both differences and invariances in performance as a function of infection status. Our findings suggest that COVID-19 infection has hardly any impact on cognition for university students.

Open access, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810023000016

 

(Haven't read the study) Does the study take into account students who had to leave school/cut their courseload etc in its assessment of impact on cognition?

 

No, it doesn't. They listed this as a limitation.
They seem to compare two different groups, rather than the same students before vs. after infection.

 

The logic is astounding. There have been widespread reports of cognitive impairment after infection. Fortunately many do end up improving but still, the rolling nature of mass reinfection means a lot of cases These academics look for the impairment, find none, and I guess conclude that the reports are wrong? Is that how this is supposed to be interpreted? Not that the evaluation is invalid? Especially given how methodologically weak and how obviously biased the authors are, the abstract is weirdly phrased? No, the only valid interpretation, in their opinion, is that the people reporting significant cognitive impairment mean nothing, I guess.

 

They are doing it wrong.

«The experiments were run online through a web browser using Javascript and HTML at the CogLab website.»

Students did this tests at home, at their own pace.

There are no data on the efforts students with covid had to manage the tests. Only wether their answers are correct.

There are no data on what impact these tests had on students with covid. Did they need to rest up after? Could they have a conversation? Read a book?

There are no data on repeated testing the next day.

For ME we know it’s typical to activate a larger part of the brain when doing cognitive tasks. And that problems often don’t show up on initial tasks, as people manage to compensate, for a while.

Problems wouldn’t be expected to show up as worse score until repeated tasks I belive, and consecutive days.

 

I can't read through all the article right now.

It is unclear to me whether the college students infected with COVID were recovered by the time of testing.

I didn't note that the COVID group had long COVID. A short-term infection with COVID might show different cognition test results than for people with long COVID.

Or, maybe I missed the discussion of the COVID group actually having long COVID.

 

Retrospective analysis out of pooled data will always be useless at stuff like this. It's as if they don't understand that what's significant is change, it's not people saying "I'm performing poorly", it's "I lost almost all my ability to function". The only way to properly research this has to rely on data prior to that change, there is far too much variation within any population to catch those.

This is the stuff, this is what matters:

I'd say my drop has been even more significant, Hannah is still clearly more functional than I am, I could never do TV interviews in my current state, and her drop is massive. The only way to catch this data is to be able to compare, this is why it was critical to begin research ASAP, not wait for the entire damn population to be infected and never having valid comparisons.

Validity. The real crisis in medicine and psychology is not replicability, it's validity. Most of what they do is invalid, they ask the wrong questions and don't seem to understand that the answer to an invalid question is completely useless.