Xavier Schmitz

Age-related differences in perceptuomotor procedural learning in children

Procedural learning is generally considered to proceed in a series of phases, with cognitive resources playing an important role during the initial step. From a developmental perspective, little is known about the development of procedural learning or the role played by explicit cognitive processes during learning. The main objectives of this study were (a) to determine whether procedural learning performance improves with age by comparing groups of 7-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults and (b) to investigate the role played by executive functions during the acquisition in these three age groups. The 76 participants were assessed on a computerized adaptation of the mirror tracing paradigm. Results revealed that the youngest children had more difficulty in adapting to the task (they were slower and committed more errors at the beginning of the learning process) than 10-year-olds, but despite this age effect observed at the outset, all children improved performance across trials and transferred their skill to a different figure as well as adults. Correlational analyses showed that inhibition abilities play a key role in the performance of 10-year-olds and adults at the beginning of the learning but not in that of 7-year-olds. Overall, our results suggest that the age-related differences observed in our procedural learning task are at least partly due to the differential involvement of inhibition abilities, which may facilitate learning (so long as they are sufficiently developed) during the initial steps of the learning process; however, they would not be a necessary condition for skill learning to occur.

Relying on procedural memory to enhance independence in daily living activities: Smartphone use in a case of semantic dementia

Relying on procedural memory is a promising approach for interventions that address the cognitive difficulties found in semantic dementia. The aim of this study was to determine if procedural memory could be used to optimise learning of relevant smartphone functions in MH, a 55-year-old man with semantic dementia. The impact of learning to use specific smartphone applications, which display concepts and their semantic characteristics, on relearning useful significant concepts, was also explored in MH. This patient, who showed no deficits in procedural learning on a serial reaction time paradigm, was able to learn manipulations related to 15 smartphone functions although, because of his deficit in word comprehension, he generally needed verbal cues to clarify which functions he was asked to perform. Six months after the end of the intervention, he was still using 8 of the 15 functions regularly. However, repeated exposure to concepts through the use of two applications did not improve naming or retrieval of semantic attributes. This study showed the potential of relying on procedural memory to optimise learning of new technologies in the ecological rehabilitation of semantic dementia.

P-331: Baseline characteristics of a two-year prospective study aiming to link clinical components, cognitive and gait performances in healthy old people

Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that presents data on the relationship between smoking and life satisfaction of older people in EU countries living independently. Non-smoking older people report a higher level of life satisfaction compared to smoking older people. The relation between smoking behaviour, diseases, disabilities and life satisfaction is complicated because smoking is related to diseases with a high mortality rate and sometimes a relatively short period with disabilities before death.

Previous errorless sequence-learning promotes subsequent SRT performance in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Background: Motor-learning capacities are known to be relatively preserved in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is crucial in the context of the patient’s autonomy (e.g., Rouleau et al., 2002). However, it is important to determine the most appropriate techniques for such learning. In AD, implicit or procedural rehabilitation techniques would be more effective to train new skills than explicit or declarative learning methods (van Halteren-van Tilborg, 2007). Maxwell et al. (2001) showed that reducing errors during motor learning minimizes the building of declarative knowledge and would allow implicit knowledge accumulation. If errorless learning induces the formation of an implicit knowledge, this technique appears to be adapted to the learning of a perceptual-motor skill in patients with impaired controlled processes. Very few studies have investigated errorless learning in procedural learning situations, even though some data suggest that errorless learning would be efficient for learning instrumental activities of daily living (e.g., Thivierge et al., 2008). Methods: In this study we examined the acquisition of a new perceptual-motor skill in 12 patients with AD and 12 healthy older adults.We compared the impact of two preliminary sequence learning conditions (errorless vs. errorful) on a serial reaction time (SRT) performance. In SRT, the subject must react as quickly as possible to the appearance of a target on a screen by pressing the key corresponding to the position of the stimulus. The effectiveness of learning is demonstrated by a reaction time improvement when the target follows a repeating sequence. Results: For patients with AD, results confirm that the advantage provided by prior learning occurs only in the errorless condition (P1⁄40,05) whereas both learning modes improve SRT performance in healthy participants (P 1⁄4 0.02 for errorless learning and P<0.01 for errorful learning). Moreover, by using the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991), we show that performance on a subsequent generation task was more sustained by controlled processes for the errorful condition than for the errorless learning (P1⁄40.03). Conclusions: In conclusion, these results confirm that the errorless learning promotes the development of implicit knowledge and appears to be an effective method for procedural learning in Alzheimer’s disease.