The processing of actions and action-words in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with prime consequences on the motor function and concomitant cognitive changes, most frequently in the domain of executive functions. Moreover, poorer performance with action-verbs versus object-nouns has been reported in ALS patien...
| Publicado en: | Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System & Behavior Vol. 64; pp. 136 - 148 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
| Formato: | Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
Masson SPA
2015 Mar
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=109705418&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 109705418 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 00109452 GMP jtl: Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System & Behavior issn: 00109452 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 2015 Mar vid: 64 pid: 12473 pub: Masson SPA artinfo: ui: 109705418 2012922900 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.10.007 NLM25461714 109705418 ppf: 136 ppct: 12 formats: tig: atl: The processing of actions and action-words in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. aug: au: Papeo, Liuba Cecchetto, Cinzia Mazzon, Giulia Granello, Giulia Cattaruzza, Tatiana Verriello, Lorenzo Eleopra, Roberto Rumiati, Raffaella I sug: ab: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with prime consequences on the motor function and concomitant cognitive changes, most frequently in the domain of executive functions. Moreover, poorer performance with action-verbs versus object-nouns has been reported in ALS patients, raising the hypothesis that the motor dysfunction deteriorates the semantic representation of actions. Using action-verbs and manipulable-object nouns sharing semantic relationship with the same motor representations, the verb-noun difference was assessed in a group of 21 ALS-patients with severely impaired motor behavior, and compared with a normal sample's performance. ALS-group performed better on nouns than verbs, both in production (action and object naming) and comprehension (word-picture matching). This observation implies that the interpretation of the verb-noun difference in ALS cannot be accounted by the relatedness of verbs to motor representations, but has to consider the role of other semantic and/or morpho-phonological dimensions that distinctively define the two grammatical classes. Moreover, this difference in the ALS-group was not greater than the noun-verb difference in the normal sample. The mental representation of actions also involves an executive-control component to organize, in logical/temporal order, the individual motor events (or sub-goals) that form a purposeful action. We assessed this ability with action sequencing tasks, requiring participants to re-construct a purposeful action from the scrambled presentation of its constitutive motor events, shown in the form of photographs or short sentences. In those tasks, ALS-group's performance was significantly poorer than controls'. Thus, the executive dysfunction manifested in the sequencing deficit -but not the selective verb deficit- appears as a consistent feature of the cognitive profile associated with ALS. We suggest that ALS can offer a valuable model to study the relationship between (frontal) motor centers and the executive-control machinery housed in the frontal brain, and the implications of executive dysfunctions in tasks such as action processing. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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