COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE AND PREGNANCY 2

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the BSc Psychology degree, Reykjavik University, this thesis is presented in the style of an article for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE AND PREGNANCY 3 Previous studies indicate that impairment on various aspects of cognition is present during pregnancy. The aim of the current research was to examine the difference in cognitive performance between pregnant and non-pregnant women and whether this difference varies with age and history of prior pregnancies. There were in total of 40 participants, 20 pregnant women and 20 non-pregnant. It was hypothesized that pregnant women will perform worse than non-pregnant women but that these differences vary with age and whether there is a history of prior pregnancies. Also, that there is no difference in cognitive performance between the groups on specific cognitive tasks such as memories for words related to pregnancy. Three cognitive tasks were used in this research. Two wordlist tasks, which each contained 15 words and participants were asked to remember as many words as they could. Two Stroop tasks, easy and hard, were participants should direct their attention to the color of the word and ignore the word itself, and a short-story task were participants read and answered 6 questions from a short-story. Main results indicated some impairments during pregnancy, more support was found for impairments on memory. Also, difference was found between the two age groups, women 25 and older performed better than women younger than 25 on the easy Stroop task and on the short-story task. Útdráttu