CAN CHILDREN WITH GILLES-DE-LA-TOURETTE-SYNDROME EDIT THEIR INTENTIONS

In this paper we describe a cognitive mechanism, the Intention Editor, which is triggered whenever there are several intentions competing in parallel with each other. This mechanism is hypothesized to be a subc omponent of a larger mechanism, the Supervisory Attentional System (SA S: Shallice, 1988) which serves inhibition in general. The Intention E ditor interrupts one of several simultaneously activated intentions, p reventing it from executing its action, utterance, or thought. This me chanism appears to develop during the first five to six years of life. We propose that an impairment in the development of this mechanism ma y account for the triad of symptoms in children with Gilles de la Tour ette Syndrome (GTS): involuntary movements, involuntary utterances, an d obsessive thoughts. This mechanism is tested with normal children ag ed 3-6 years old, and with children with GTS, in two experiments. In E xperiment 1, subjects were required to make one hand movement while in hibiting making a (different) hand movement that the other hand was si multaneously making. In Experiment 2, they were asked to say one thing while inhibiting saying something else. On both tasks, normal 6-year- olds were significantly better than normal 4-year-olds, but children w ith GTS performed worse than normal 6-year-olds, despite having a mean age of 12 years. These results constitute preliminary evidence for th e theory that the Intention Editor is dysfunctional in GTS.