Executive (dys)function in aged people with and without Alzheimer: Expectation-based strategic action.

Abstract

The executive dysfunction (EdF) is a central mental alteration in people with Alzheimer’ dementia (AD). In this work, we explore its deficit in an aspect that has barely been investigated: strategic action based on managing expectations, developed by the novel use of familiar stimuli. For this purpose, we administered a variant of the Stroop test to a group of healthy young adults and to two groups of aged people, one with and one without AD. Depending on the efficacy with which they performed the task strategically, the influence of this action could predominate the automatic processing of names, thus enabling them to generate qualitatively different patterns of results. We found that, whereas the young people showed an inverse Stroop pattern, the aged people with AD displayed the conventional pattern, and the behavior of the aged people without AD was at an intermediate point. This implies that AD evolves with additional loss (to that produced by advanced age) of the capacity for expectation-based strategic action.