Memory for Action in Neurological Patients

Memory for action is especially important in everyday life although current literature is not very abundant. The enactment effect (i.e. better memory for performed actions than for verbally encoded sentences) is usually described as a robust effect in aging and can be found in many diseases. Although the enactment effect has been studied for three decades, there is still no consensus on how it enhances memory. Therefore, in order to gain additional insight into the representational basis of the enactment effect, in the present study, the investigators propose to test neurological patients. The investigators suggested that memory for action should be better than memory for verbally encoded information in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

If patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) have no cognitive assessment during the last 6 months, then they will realize different tests: MMSE (1), HAD (2), a cognitive assessment (3); (4); BREF (5); Assessment of apraxia, (6). Controls will perform the same tests to verify that they have no cognitive impairment. Then, two experimental conditions will be presented in all patients and controls: a first in which participants will have to name drawings (verbal learning) and a second in which they will have to reproduce an action associated with drawings (action learning). Immediately after this learning phase, a recognition task will be available and therefore participants will have to recognize drawings that had been presented previously. The main criteria used in the statistical analysis will be the correct recognition score.