Degenerative Amnesia for Past Public Events: An Attempt to Measure Storage and Retrieval.

A still unsettled issue of amnesia concerns the differential contributions to recall impairment of the underlying retrieval and storage abilities. The aim of the present study was to disentangle and to measure such roles in the recall of past public events comparing patients with degenerative amnesia and healthy elderly. The experiment included 44 healthy elderly and two groups of participants with degenerative amnesia, namely 17 patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and 22 mild Alzheimer's disease patients.

Autobiographical memory in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Autobiographical memory (ABM) was evaluated in 19 patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) by means of the standardized enquiry developed by Borrini et al. (Psychol Med 19:215-224, 1989). Longitudinal assessments were carried out by re-testing participants at 9-month intervals up to three assessments over 18 months.

Mild cognitive impairment does entail retrograde amnesia for public events.

In this study memory for public events was evaluated in 15 amnesic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) patients, whose clinical diagnosis was refined through a stringent selection procedure. A total of 9 patients were longitudinally reassessed over an 18-month period. About half of the participants were impaired at baseline and nearly 80% at the end of the 18-month follow-up.

A reappraisal of person recognition and identification.

In the last years an increasing number of cases (Gainotti et al., 2008, this issue) have been reported in whom difficulty to recognise and identify familiar people occurs in everyday multimodal settings, differently from unimodal face-specific impairments (i.e.

Recollection of public events in healthy people: a latent-variable stochastic approach to disentangling retrieval and storage.

Recollection of media-mediated past events was examined in 96 healthy participants to investigate the interaction between the age of the subject and the "age" of memories. The results provided evidence that people older than 75 years recall recent events significantly worse than remote ones. Younger participants (47-60 years old) showed the reverse pattern.

Gesture imitation with lower limbs following left hemisphere stroke.

Ideomotor apraxia (IMA) of lower limbs has rarely been investigated systematically. This is the aim of the current study. Thirty-five patients with a unilateral stroke in the left hemisphere were tested within 30 days from onset with an upper limb IMA test and with a newly devised test assessing leg IMA.

Hemisphere asymmetry for imitation of hand and finger movements, Goldenberg's hypothesis reworked.

Goldenberg and co-workers put forward the hypothesis that coding of hand gestures with respect to body parts depends upon the functioning of the left hemisphere while the right hemisphere would be involved in imitation of finger postures. They supported this claim with experimental evidence from lesion studies, however, they failed to back it up with functional neuroimaging data. To verify Goldenberg's hypothesis on hemisphere asymmetries for hand/finger postures imitation, the performance of 35 patients with left hemisphere lesion (L/pts), of 24 patients with right hemisphere lesion (R/pts) and that of 41 matched controls was assessed in two imitation tasks, respectively, taxing hand or finger postures.

A new account of face apraxia based on a longitudinal study.

The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation of face apraxia which accounts also for the role of right hemisphere lesions. Thirty-one patients with left hemisphere (L/pts) and 31 patients with right hemisphere (R/pts) lesions entered a cross-sectional study to identify those presenting with either lower or upper face apraxia. The 16L/pts and 8R/pts who presented with face apraxia in the acute stage and could be retested 4 months later, were followed up longitudinally.

[Dementias: mostly clinico-neuropsychological or mostly psychometric diagnosis?].

In this paper many critical reflections on diagnosis management of patients affected by dementia have been reported. In particular, the importance of clinico-neuropsychological evaluation of patients with respect to management prevalently based on neuropsychological tests is underlined. In this view a periodic diagnostic exercise with the objective of improving the diagnostic approach of dementias has been proposed to the Alzheimer's disease units (UVA) included in the Cronos Project.

The role of semantic knowledge on the cognitive estimation task--evidence from Alzheimer's disease and healthy adult aging.

The current study investigated the role of semantic knowledge on the Cognitive Estimation Task (CET). In an initial experiment, the CET performance of 21 patients with frontal lobe lesions was compared with 21 healthy controls. The CET was found to be sensitive to the effects of frontal lobe lesions.

Upper and lower face and ideomotor apraxia in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Introduction: Apraxia of face movement in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been rarely investigated. This study aimed at investigating the frequency of lower (mouth, tongue and throat) and upper (eyes and eyebrows) face apraxia, in AD and its relationship with limb apraxia and severity of dementia.

Methods: Fifty seven patients with AD were tested with a new standardised test of face apraxia including upper and lower face movements, which uses an item-difficulty weighted scoring procedure, the IMA test, a test of ideomotor apraxia and the M.

Covert person recognition: its fadeout in a case of temporal lobe degeneration.

Covert person recognition was investigated longitudinally over a three-year period in a patient suffering from "Crossmodal Familiar Person Agnosia", possibly due to a fronto-temporal dementia in its right temporal variant (Gentileschi et al., 2001). The progressive neuronal degeneration in the cortical regions critical for face recognition (viz.

Utilisation behaviour consequent to bilateral SMA softening.

The case of patient CU, who presented with severe utilisation behaviour, eventually unaccompanied by psychometric signs of frontal involvement, is reported. He suffered from a bilateral stroke within the territory of the anterior cerebral artery. His arterial system was characterised by a unique variant, whereby the right anterior cerebral artery was missing and three trunks originated from the left anterior cerebral artery, each bifurcating into right and left branches.