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La Teoria della Mente nei disturbi neurodegenerativi: La comprensione del comportamento sociale altrui in persone con Malattia del Motoneurone.
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Theory of Mind in Neurodegenerative Diseases
No full textBACKGROUND: Theory of Mind (ToM), defined as the ability to attribute mental states to one???s self and others, plays a key role in driving behaviour and social interactions. An issue under current debate is whether the behavioural problems usually reported in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and, in a more subtle form, in other neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., motor neurone disease, MND), may at least partially be the result of an impairment in ToM. METHODS: The study investigated the attribution of social versus private intentions in small groups of FTD and MND patients, using a task in which participants had to choose the most appropriate endings for comic strips. The comic strips depicted: social interactions between characters; private actions performed by a single character; or causal links amongst objects, with no characters involved. RESULTS: Single case analysis showed the difficulty of some patients to attribute social (but not private) intentions to characters correctly. DISCUSSION: These findings suggest that attributing social intentions to others may require a cognitive integrity that is affected by these neurodegenerative diseases, leading to a difficulty in correctly interpreting and managing social interactions
Knowing how to behave properly: Preliminary evidence of defective 'social understanding' in neurodegenerative diseases.
No full textBackground: 'Social understanding' refers to the everyday-life complex ability of interpreting social situations properly. It has been recently proposed that the severe social and behavioural problems that often characterize neurodegenerative diseases such as dementias and motor neurone disease (MND) may at least partially be the result of a significant impairment in 'social understanding'.
Aims: To investigate in two separate studies whether dementia and motor neurone diseases patients showed the presence of defective 'social understanding' ability.
Methods: Two groups of dementia patients (n = 10) and MND (n = 9), recruited in Italy and Scotland respectively, underwent standard neurological and neuropsychological assessment. Two groups of matched healthy controls (n = 15) and (n = 10) were selected too. Then, a validated comic strip task encompassing both "social" and "non-social" stereotyped situations was administered to all of the participants in both studies.
Results: Dementia patients performed poorly on the comic strip task, compared with healthy controls. More precisely, their performance on both the "non-social" and the "social" parts of the comic strip task were significantly impaired, but with the "social" part appearing to be more compromised. On the other hand, MND patients performed well on the "non-social" part of the comic strip task, but interestingly their performance on the "social" part was significantly poor, compared with healthy controls.
Discussion: These preliminary findings suggest the presence in these neurodegenerative conditions of a more severe difficulty in interpreting and understanding properly those stories that explicitly referred to social situations (i.e. "social" stories), compared with those stories that did not refer explicitly to social situations (i.e. "non-social" stories). Thus, our studies showed for the first time evidence for the presence of specific 'social understanding' problems associated with both these neurodegenerative conditions, and underlined the necessity of further research in order to gain a deeper understanding on the possible link between the behavioural/social problems typically showed by the patients and their 'social understanding' impairment
Frontal subregions mediating Elevator Counting task performance.
No full textDeficits in sustained attention may lead to action slips in everyday life as irrelevant action sequences are inappropriately triggered internally or by the environment. While deficits in sustained attention have been associated with damage to the frontal lobes of the brain, little is known about the role of the frontal lobes in the Elevator Counting subtest of the Test of Everyday Attention. In the current study, 55 frontal patients subdivided into medial, orbital and lateral subgroups, 18 patients with posterior lesions and 82 healthy controls performed the Elevator Counting task. The results revealed that patients with medial and left lateral prefrontal lesions were significantly impaired on the task compared to healthy controls. Research suggests that patients with medial lesions are susceptible to competition from task irrelevant schema; whereas the left lateral group in the current study may fail to keep track of the tones already presented
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