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Abstract: The aim of the present study was to determine whether monitoring measures are differentially disturbed in dysexecutive patients after frontal lesions. Twelve dysexecutive patients and 12 healthy controls were administered a paired-associates learning task. Their performances on recall prediction, judgment-of-learning (JOL), and feeling-of-knowing judgment (FOK) were then compared. The results revealed that the two groups differed only on accuracy measures of the FOK paradigm. The study of the overall correlations between the three measures of metamemory revealed a significant relation between recall prediction and accuracy measures of the JOL. We failed to find any significant correlation with the accuracy measures of the FOK. Taken together, our data confirm that metamemory experience is not a unitary construct but rather a group of distinct and quite independent mechanisms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A particularly important aspect of executive functioning involves the ability to form and carry out complex plans, that is to say planning. This study aimed to investigate planning in 18 older and 16 younger normal participants using an ecological planning subtask derived from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome test battery, the “Zoo Map Test.” There are two trials. The first trial consists of a “high demand” version of the subtask in which the participants must plan in advance the order in which they will visit designated locations in a zoo (formulation level). In the second, or “low demand” version, the participant is simply required to follow a concrete externally imposed strategy to reach the locations to visit (execution level). The two-way ANOVAs mainly showed more difficulties in elderly adults than in younger adults, more difficulties in formulation level than in execution level, and lastly a greater difference between formulation and execution in older participants than in younger adults. These results suggest that elderly participants have some problems developing logical strategies whereas they are able to execute complex predetermined plans. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine executive functioning in patients with Huntington’s disease using an arithmetic word-problem-solving task including eight solvable problems of increasing complexity and four aberrant problems. Ten patients with Huntington’s disease and 12 normal control subjects matched by age and education were tested. Patients with Huntington’s disease performed the solvable problems significantly worse than the normal control subjects, but there was no difference in performance between the two groups in inhibiting aberrant problems. These results suggest that early Huntington’s disease patients exhibit a precocious impairment in their ability to plan the resolution of complex arithmetic word problems without deficit in their ability to eliminate aberrant problems. This dissociation of performance fits with what we have found in such patients using script-sequencing tasks () and with neuropsychological data obtained by . These results are consistent with what is known about the neuropathological progression of Huntington’s disease in which neuronal loss progresses in a dorso-to-ventral direction and with what was shown in patients with circumscribed frontal lobe damage. In these patients, impairments in planning solvable word problems were more frequent when lesions were in the lateral prefrontal regions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present investigation examined the functioning of inhibitory mechanisms in younger and older bilinguals using a bilingual version of the Stroop test. The study predicted different patterns of age related decline in inhibitory mechanisms (inter- and intralingual interference) in bilinguals depending on their level of proficiency. Consistent with expectations, older bilinguals were slower when they responded in their non-dominant language. Furthermore, older unbalanced bilinguals showed greater interlingual interference when they responded with their second language to visual stimuli written in their dominant language. Balanced bilinguals showed equivalent interference effects between all conditions. These findings suggest that manipulating two languages may enhance the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]