Affiliations: [a] Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Centre, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium | [b] Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium | [c] National Fund for Scientific Research FRS-FNRS, Belgium | [d] Cognitive Psychopathology Unit, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland | [e] Memory Centre, Neurology Department, CHU, Liège, Belgium
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: Fabienne Collette, Neuropsychology Unit, University of Liège, Boulevard du Rectorat 3 (B33), 4000 Liège, Belgium. Tel.: +32 4 366 22 74; Fax: +32 4 366 28 75; E-mail: f.collette@ulg.ac.be.
Note: [] Handling Associate Editor: Anna Rita Giovagnoli
Abstract: A decline of cognitive functioning affecting several cognitive domains was frequently reported in patients with frontotemporal dementia. We were interested in determining if these deficits can be interpreted as reflecting an impairment of controlled cognitive processes by using an assessment tool specifically developed to explore the distinction between automatic and controlled processes, namely the process dissociation procedure (PDP) developed by Jacoby [1]. The PDP was applied to a word stem completion task to determine the contribution of automatic and controlled processes to episodic memory performance and was administered to a group of 12 patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD) and 20 control subjects (CS). Bv-FTD patients obtained a lower performance than CS for the estimates of controlled processes, but no group differences was observed for estimates of automatic processes. The between-groups comparison of the estimates of controlled and automatic processes showed a larger contribution of automatic processes to performance in bv-FTD, while a slightly more important contribution of controlled processes was observed in control subjects. These results are clearly indicative of an alteration of controlled memory processes in bv-FTD.
