title: Script knowledge in right hemisphere-damaged and in normal elderly adults.
abstract: Right hemisphere brain-damaged (RHD) patients and healthy elderly and younger control subjects were tested on a battery of tasks designed to probe their script knowledge. More specifically, their ability to access and organize script information was assessed under conditions that varied in information-processing demands. For this purpose, two types of script tasks were employed: free response tasks, for which subjects had to structure their own responses, and constrained response tasks, in which subjects had to choose the better of two possible responses. All RHD patients tested had shown impairments on other narrative tasks. Subjects were asked to produce the sequences of steps which comprise two common activities and to provide continuations for segments of scripts (free-response tasks); they also were required to judge script element membership, temporal order, and relative importance (constrained-response tasks). The RHD patients and elderly and control subjects demonstrated a generally preserved knowledge of script information on all tasks. However, because of variability in the response style from the RHD patients and elderly subjects on free-response tasks, individual cases were examined. Several RHD patients' script productions were characterized by tangentiality while other patients showed a tendency to terminate their script productions prematurely. Four of ten elderly subjects produced highly personalized scripts. The relation of performance on these tasks to other documented narrative impairments is considered.
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001037:Aphasia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000175:diagnosis*; D003210:Concept Formation; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014706:Verbal Learning