Title |
The processing of actions and action-words in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients
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Published in |
Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System & Behavior, October 2014
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DOI | 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.10.007 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Liuba Papeo, Cinzia Cecchetto, Giulia Mazzon, Giulia Granello, Tatiana Cattaruzza, Lorenzo Verriello, Roberto Eleopra, Raffaella I. Rumiati |
Abstract |
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. |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
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United Kingdom | 1 | 1% |
Italy | 1 | 1% |
Unknown | 78 | 98% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Ph. D. Student | 13 | 16% |
Researcher | 9 | 11% |
Professor > Associate Professor | 7 | 9% |
Student > Master | 7 | 9% |
Professor | 7 | 9% |
Other | 24 | 30% |
Unknown | 13 | 16% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 23 | 29% |
Neuroscience | 18 | 23% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 9 | 11% |
Linguistics | 5 | 6% |
Social Sciences | 4 | 5% |
Other | 6 | 8% |
Unknown | 15 | 19% |