Age, sex, and lesion site in aphasic stroke patients with single focal damage.

Studied the relations of age, sex, and lesion site to aphasia type in 270 stroke patients (aged 18–93 yrs). No relation was found between either age and lesion site or age and aphasia type in a subsample of 63 aphasics with left anterior or posterior lesion. Ss with atypical aphasia (i.e., anterior-damaged Ss with global or fluent aphasia and posterior-damaged Ss with global or nonfluent aphasia) were significantly older than Ss with classical aphasia. This finding points to a lesser specification of the expressive and receptive functions with age. Sex was not related to aphasia type, but it influenced the site of the lesion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning and forgetting processes in Parkinson's disease: a model-based approach to disentangling storage, retention and retrieval contributions

Learning and forgetting a prose passage was studied in 20 patients with Parkinson's disease and in 20 normal control subjects by means of stochastic models, with the aim of identifying the learning and retaining abilities that are affected by Parkinson's disease. Results suggested that Parkinson's disease patients are impaired in developing automatic processing both during learning and retaining, while functions that require active attention are spared. The automatic/intentional dissociation, which is the hallmark of motor disturbance in Parkinson's disease, extends to memory abilities, and, on the grounds of neuroanatomical, neurochemical and neurophysiological correlates, suggests that the memory deficit in Parkinson's disease may be contingent on a dysfunction of the medial prefrontal-cingulate cortex.     

Verbal learning strategies in Parkinson's disease.

Word-list learning was studied in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and normal control (NC) participants by means of the selective-reminding procedure of H. Buschke and P. A. Fuld (1974) in 3 learning conditions using semantically unrelated items; semantically related items, whose implicit categorical structure had to be spontaneously guessed; and semantically related items, whose explicit categorical structure was known in advance. The PD patients displayed poor learning in all 3 conditions. To identify the functional locus of the PD patients' deficits, the authors performed a stochastic Markov chain analysis, which allowed individual measurements of encoding, retrieval, and category clustering abilities. PD patients were never significantly impaired in encoding word engrams; their impairment was confined to automatic and intentional retrieval and to the ability to benefit from explicit semantic clues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)