“Imagine someone on a grocery trip who suddenly forgot what they intended to buy,” Joost provides as an example. “Did they fail to properly memorize the necessary groceries at home? Did they forget on the way there? Or was their attention so divided that the information never fully registered in the first place? Traditional test scores can indicate that a cognitive function is impaired, but newer methods can pinpoint where in the cognitive process things go wrong.”
In 2021, Joost received a KWF Dutch Cancer Society Young Investigator Grant to investigate whether computational models can uncover these underlying cognitive processes. “Digital tests generate vast amounts of data: every mouse click, every reaction time. I developed mathematical models that can translate such detailed data into scores for memory retention, forgetting, divided attention, and more.”
These initial methods worked well in group-level comparisons. They showed that cancer patients receiving chemotherapy often struggle specifically with retrieving information from memory, for example, rather than with the initial memorization. Joost: “But this does not help the individual patients. To be able to do that, we will need to be able to determine which cognitive process is disrupted in the individual.”
With his new Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Joost will expand these computational models so they can determine whether specific cognitive processes are impaired in an individual, and predict who is likely to benefit from a particular intervention.
The new methods will be tested on existing datasets from cancer patients but are applicable to any condition in which cognitive impairments may occur. “If we can identify which processes are affected with more precision, psychologists will be able to offer more targeted interventions and measure the effect more accurately. This can benefit people with cancer, brain injuries, and other neurological conditions.”