Many researches about age related changes in cognitive performance belong to the structural conception of Working Memory (WM). This conception explain the WM impairment as a consequence of a decline of WM efficiency and especially of its attentional component (central executive) such as defined in Baddeley's model (1986, 1993). But, there is also evidence that the functioning of the central executive is impaired in Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (DAT). It seems then difficult to distinguish the DAT patients at early stage from the elderly people. The unitary conception of working memory could then help us to point to qualitative differences in the pattern of performance of these two populations. Indeed this conception considers working memory as an active portion of long term memory governed by inhibitory and activator processes. In this way, Hasher and Zacks (1988), Stoltzfus, Hasher, and Zacks (1996) explain working memory deficit by a deficit in inhibition processes. They distinguish three types of inhibition processes: 1) suppression mechanisms in blocking entrance to working memory; 2) inhibition of non pertinent activated information in working memory; 3) inhibition of automatic response (greater interference). The goal of our study is to investigate further this impairment in DAT and in elderly people in reference to the types of inhibitory processes (Stoltzfus et al., 1996). Two tasks taped respectively each inhibitory type (verbal updating task and visuo-spatial updating task for type (2) and Stroop task and Hayling task for type (3). Twelve elderly volunteers matched per age and twelve aged DAT patients performed the experiences. We suggested that the type of impaired inhibitory processes would allow us to distinguish between elderly people and DAT. Performance was more impaired in the DAT group than in the elderly group in all tasks but there was no difference between groups at the level of impaired inhibitory processes. The results are discussed according to the nature of the task and to the type of errors made by the elderly people and the DAT patients.

There is considerable debate on the extent to which reading and spelling rely on shared versus distinct cognitive processes (Tainturier & Rapp, 2001). Studies of brain-damaged individuals with impaired access to orthography have supported both views. Of particular interest are cases of "surface dyslexia," a disorder characterised by a dissociation between impaired reading of irregular words and relatively preserved reading of regular words and nonwords. Most errors are regularisations (e.g., CHEF--> "tchef"). Surface dyslexia is believed to result from a deficit at the level of the orthographic lexicon, a memory store of the spelling of familiar words. The accurate reading of regular words and nonwords is thought to reflect the use of a spared non-lexical route to reading. Attempting to read irregular words through this route will result in regularisation errors because the sublexical process maps graphemes to their most common pronunciation (i.e., CH pronounced "tch" rather than "sh"). Advocates of shared orthographic lexicons (e.g., Behrmann & Bub, 1992) have stressed the fact that patients with surface dyslexia usually also suffer from "surface dysgraphia," a disorder affecting words with ambiguous/irregular spellings and manifesting itself by the production of phonologically plausible errors such as "knowledge" --> NOLIGE. However, advocates of distinct reading/spelling lexicons (e.g., Caramazza, 1988) have pointed out that some patients have surface dysgraphia without surface dyslexia. This might suggest impaired access to an orthographic output lexicon used in spelling with preserved access to an orthographic input lexicon used in reading and written word recognition. We report the first case of a patient who presents with the opposite dissociation, that is, prototypical surface dyslexia with entirely preserved spelling. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

Two main hypotheses have been proposed regarding the role of phonology in written word production. According to the phonological mediation hypothesis, the retrieval of the lexical phonological representation of a word is an obligatory prerequisite to the retrieval of its spelling. Therefore, deficits to the phonological lexicon should affect both spoken and written picture naming, In contrast, the orthographic autonomy hypothesis posits that the lexical orthographic representations of words can be accessed without any necessary phonological mediation. In support of this view, cases of preserved written naming despite impaired lexical phonology have been reported following brain damage. In this report, we replicate this basic pattern of performance in case YP, a 60-year-old woman with a pattern of frontotemporal dementia, As her disease progressed, YP's ability to write down the names of pictures remained very good despite a severe decline in oral naming. Further testing indicated that this deficit was not primarily due to an articulatory or post-lexical phonological deficit. YP's case provides strong additional support for the orthographic autonomy hypothesis. The significance of this case with respect to the characterization of dementia syndromes is discussed.

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) produce a high rate of semantic errors when naming to confrontation. This is considered to be one of the many consequences of their semantic memory deficit. However, it has been shown, in aphasic patients with focal lesions, that semantic errors could arise from impairment to any one of the levels in the naming process. To check this hypothesis in AD, we assessed in 15 patients the capacity to name and access semantic knowledge (by multiple-choice probe questions) about 14 objects presented successively in the visual, tactile, auditory, and verbal modalities. In the visual naming task, 33 errors were recorded: 26 (78.8%) were semantic and 7 (21.2%) were unrelated errors. Of the 26 semantic errors, 8 were related to a deficit of the semantic knowledge related to the item and 17 to a deficit in the retrieval of the phonological form of the word. One was associated with a deficit of access to semantic knowledge in the visual modality. The 7 unrelated errors were associated with a loss of semantic knowledge for 4 and deficit of access to the phonological form for 3. In conclusion, this study shows that semantic errors do not systematically reflect a deficit of semantic knowledge in Alzheimer's disease. It also seems that unrelated errors are more frequently related to semantic deficits than semantic errors in this population.

Cognitive impairments in Parkinson's disease (PD) could be explained by a central executive (CE) deficit in A. D. Baddeley's (1986) working memory model. To test this hypothesis, verbal, spatial, and double span tasks were given to 12 medicated PD patients and control participants, with varying recall delays. The double span task was assigned to explore the coordinating and integrating function of the CE, and lengthening the recall delay was expected to implicate more attentional resources. PD patients had lower spans relative to controls in all tasks. However, the more specific implication of the CE was difficult to prove. One reason could be that PD patients were on dopaminergic treatment when tested. To control this effect, 12 PD patients on and off medication were studied in a second experiment using the same tasks. PD patients off medication had lower spans only in the double task; this result underlines the role of dopamine on working memory processes.

Previous studies of executive/attentional functions have found impairments in nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia. The aims of this study were. (1) to replicate these findings by three laboratory measures of attention/information processing - a continuous performance test (DS-CPT), a forced-choice span of apprehension task (SPAN), and a digit symbol substitution test (DSST), and by a series of neuropsychological tests sensitive to prefrontal cortical damage - Trail Making A and B, verbal fluency (VFT), Stroop Color and Word Test (Stroop), and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST); (2) to investigate whether such executive/attentional deficits are associated with schizotypal traits assessed using the social anhedonia, physical anhedortia. perceptual aberration and magical ideation scales (Chapman, L.J., Chapman, J.P., Raulin, M.L. 1976. Scales for physical and social anhedonia. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 85, 374-382; Chapman, L.J., Chapman, J.P., Raulin, IM.L., 1978. Body-image aberration in schizophrenia. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 87, 399-407; Eckblad, M., Chapman, L.J., 1983. Magical ideation as an indicator of schizotypy. J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 51, 215-225).In both patient and relative groups, performance was significantly poorer on the DSST, VFT and Trail B, and the reaction time on the SPAN was significantly longer. These neuropsychological impairments were present as much in siblings as in parents of schizophrenic patients: age did not appear to cancel differences between the relative and control groups. In the relative group, the four scores of schizotypy were at an intermediate level between those of patient and control groups, and the social anhedonia and perceptual aberration scores tended to be significantly different between the relative and the control groups. Only two significant correlations were found between the neuropsychological performance and the measures of schizotypy. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The impairment in tasks requiring intact frontal lobe functions has been repeatedly shown in schizophrenics. However, the relative roles of confounding factors, like duration of the disease, social withdrawal, or antidopaminergic medication, are not clearly demonstrated. We studied the performance of 12 young active patients, with chronic residual schizophrenia that had recent onset, and 12 control subjects, with frontal lobe tests and with a battery designed to explore working memory. The results show normal performance in schizophrenia. The small number of patients does not allow definitive conclusions, but this study suggests that a frontal dysfunction may not be present early in the evolution of schizophrenia in active patients.

We have previously described impairments of cognitive executive functions in 17 patients with OSAS in comparison with 17 normal controls, as assessed by various frontal-lobe-related tests. In the present study, 10 of these OSAS patients treated with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) were reevaluated after 4-6 months of treatment. Neuropsychological tasks explored attention, short-term memory span, learning abilities, planning capacities, categorizing activities, and verbal fluency. Patients were found to have normalized most of their cognitive executive and learning disabilities, but all the short-term memory tests remained unchanged. These findings are discussed in light of the contribution of the frontal-lobe-related systems to short-term memory functions, and the eventual pathogenic role played by sleep fragmentation and nocturnal hypoxemia, which are related to the occurrence of apneic and hypopneic events. In conclusion, short-term memory impairment was persistent in OSAS patients despite CPAP treatment for 4-6 months.

The role of semantic knowledge in object utilisation is a matter of debate. It is usually presumed that access to semantic knowledge is a necessary condition for manipulation, but a few reports challenged this view. The existence of a direct, pre-semantic route from vision to action has been proposed. We report the case of a patient with a disorder of object use in everyday life, in the context of probable Alzheimers disease. This patient was also impaired when manipulating single objects. He showed a striking dissociation between impairment in object use and preserved capacity to perform symbolic and meaningless gestures. To elucidate the nature of the disorder, and to clarify the relations between semantic knowledge and object use, we systematically assessed his capacity to recognise, name, access semantic knowledge, and use 15 common objects. We found no general semantic impairment for the objects that were not correctly manipulated, and, more importantly, no difference between the semantic knowledge of objects correctly manipulated and objects incorrectly manipulated. These data, although not incompatible with the hypothesis of a direct route for action, are better accommodated by the idea of a distributed semantic memory, where different types of knowledge are represented, as proposed by Allport (Allport, D. A. Current perspectives in dysphasia, pp. 32–60. Churchill Livingstone, Edinbuirgh, 1985).

The impairment in tasks requiring intact frontal lobe functions has been repeatedly shown in schizophrenics. However, the relative roles of confounding factors, like duration of the disease, social withdrawal, or antidopaminergic medication, are not clearly demonstrated We studied the performance of 12 young active patients, with chronic residual schizophrenia that had recent onset, and 12 control subjects, with frontal lobe tests and with a battery designed to explore working memory. The results show normal performance in schizophrenics. The small number of patients does not allow definitive conclusions, but this study suggests that a frontal dysfunction may not be present early in the evolution of schizophrenia in active patients.

OBJECTIVE:To test the verbal subsystem of Baddeley's working memory model (the phonological loop) in patients with Parkinson's disease.METHODS:Fifteen patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease and 15 controls were tested with a span paradigm to assess the effects reflecting the functioning of the phonological loop: the phonological similarity effect (in verbal and visual presentation), and the word length effect (in visual presentation).RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS:The patients did not show any dysfunction of the phonological loop, reflected by the presence of phonological similarity and word length effects, but had lower spans than controls. The implications of these results for the working memory model are discussed.

Following cerebral anoxia, EC, a 55-year-old patient, exhibited a severe and clear-cut pattern of semantic impairments without general intellectual deficit or perceptual difficulty. EC demonstrated a complex neuropsychological picture including a massive visual agnosia and a complete lack of imagery, both of which involved all categories of objects (living and non living) and a category-specific word comprehension deficit limited to animal names. Findings are discussed in the light of the theoretical frameworks currently available in the area of neuropsychology. It is argued that neither the single nor the multiple view of semantics fully succeed in providing a satisfactory account of the data and a tentative interpretation of the whole pattern of impairment is proposed in the general framework of non abstractive conceptions of meaning.

OBJECTIVE:To determine whether a deficit of the central executive can explain the attentional deficits of patients with Parkinson's disease.METHODS:Fifteen patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease and 15 controls were given a dual task paradigm minimising motor demands and combining verbal, visual, or spatial span with two conditions of articulatory suppression.RESULTS:Although the spans were systematically lower in medicated parkinsonian patients than in controls, suggesting a decrease of central processing resources, there was no direct evidence for a deficit of the central executive.CONCLUSIONS:A deficit of the central executive either is not an inevitable feature of the disease, or is dependent on the nature of task (visuomotor v cognitive), or is corrected by dopaminergic medication.

Few studies have been conducted to investigate face recognition and naming in dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT). It was recently suggested (Hedges et al., 1993) that DAT patients exhibit difficulty in face naming. This difficulty could be due to a deficit in semantic knowledge, but more surprisingly, an associated deficit at a pre-semantic level could account for part of the poor performance of DAT patients. To clarify these findings, we conducted an experimental study to assess face recognition and naming in DAT. The design of the experiment was based upon the model developed by Bruce and Young (1986). Ten patients with probable DAT and 10 control subjects were tested. The results showed a deficit in DAT patients that appears to stem from poor access to semantic knowledge about person identity, especially when identity must be accessed from the face. No deficit was found at the pre-semantic level.

We report the case of an intramuscular cavernous and capillary hemangioma of the thigh revealed by pains evolving for 2 years and by an amyotrophy. After 21 months of investigation, the surgical excision and the histological examination only established the dia Thigh MRI. T1-weighted axial and sagittal sections with gadolinium infusion.

We report a case of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), with melokinetic apraxia and alien-hand phenomenon. A detailed neuropsychological assessment found visuospatial and short-term memory impairments. The patient's course was marked by progressive worsening of motor symptoms, leading to death within 6 years, but dementia was not observed. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed bilateral parietal atrophy, and single-photon emission tomography (SPECT) revealed bilateral frontotemporal and right parietal hypoperfusion. This case emphasizes the fact that melokinetic apraxia may be the initial symptom of CBD. The analysis of clinical, neuropsychological, MRI, and SPECT data favors the role of parietal regions in the clinical manifestations, particularly in the motor disorder.

Case Reports| February 13 2008 Frontal Lobe Syndrome after a Left Genu Capsular Infarction Subject Area: Neurology and Neuroscience Olivier Moreaud; Olivier Moreaud aService Neurologie et Neuropsychologie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, BP 217, Grenoble, Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Annik Charnallet; Annik Charnallet aService Neurologie et Neuropsychologie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, BP 217, Grenoble, Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Danielle David; Danielle David aService Neurologie et Neuropsychologie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, BP 217, Grenoble, Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Luc Cinotti; Luc Cinotti bCERMEP, Bron, France Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jacques Pellat Jacques Pellat aService Neurologie et Neuropsychologie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, BP 217, Grenoble, Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Eur Neurol (1996) 36 (5): 322–324. https://doi.org/10.1159/000117282 Article history Published Online: February 13 2008 Content Tools Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Olivier Moreaud, Annik Charnallet, Danielle David, Luc Cinotti, Jacques Pellat; Frontal Lobe Syndrome after a Left Genu Capsular Infarction. Eur Neurol 1 May 1996; 36 (5): 322–324. https://doi.org/10.1159/000117282 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsEuropean Neurology Search Advanced Search This content is only available via PDF. 1996Copyright / Drug Dosage / DisclaimerCopyright: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be translated into other languages, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, microcopying, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.Drug Dosage: The authors and the publisher have exerted every effort to ensure that drug selection and dosage set forth in this text are in accord with current recommendations and practice at the time of publication. However, in view of ongoing research, changes in government regulations, and the constant flow of information relating to drug therapy and drug reactions, the reader is urged to check the package insert for each drug for any changes in indications and dosage and for added warnings and precautions. This is particularly important when the recommended agent is a new and/or infrequently employed drug.Disclaimer: The statements, opinions and data contained in this publication are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of the publishers and the editor(s). The appearance of advertisements or/and product references in the publication is not a warranty, endorsement, or approval of the products or services advertised or of their effectiveness, quality or safety. The publisher and the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content or advertisements. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Marchiafava-Bignami disease is a complication of chronic ethanol intoxication. The clinical course may be acute, rapidly leading to death, or marked by a progressive dementia. A form with favorable outcome is also described. During the evolution of chronic forms, acute worsenings are possible, with subsequent partial recovery. We report a clinico-radiological case, where a first episode was followed by a good outcome. After a second episode, 3 years later, the patient developed a dementia with predominant frontal lobe signs. This case suggests that, even after a favorable outcome, a long-term poor prognosis cannot be ruled out.

A dysfunction of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPF) in major depression is suggested by functional imagery and comparative neuropsychology. However, assessment of frontal lobe syndrom with DLPF-dependant tests led to controversial results. To clarify these findings, we administered 5 of these tests (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Test, Trail Making Test, Tower of Toronto, verbal fluency) to 16 major depressive subjects and their 16 controls, before and after 21 days of treatment. Furthermore, we tried to assess the pronostic value of frontal lobe dysfunction, and its relation with the endogenous or exogenous nature of the depression on the one hand, the severity of the depression on the other hand. Our results suggest that the presence of a frontal lobe syndrome (defined by impaired performances at 3 tests or more) is only noted in endogenous depression; after treatment, no impairment is detected. No correlation is found with the severity of the depression. Frontal lobe syndrome does not seem to indicate poorer pronostic for current depressive episod.