The scripting of activities of daily living in normal aging: Anticipation and shifting deficits with preservation of sequencing

The purpose or this study was to elaborate upon Shallice's frontal lobe mod el by evaluating 20 elderly normal and 20 young adult controls, all women, with cognitive tests, a paper-pencil script generation task and a kitchenet te meal preparation task. The elderly were significantly weaker on standard ized tests of executive functions and on the paper-pencil script generation task. An anticipation and a sequencing impairment clearly emerged. Though anticipation and shirting were compromised in the kitchenette script task, sequencing was however preserved. This supports Shallice's notion according which scripting is hierarchically organized with top level components bein g more frontal lobe dependent (supervisory attentional system or SAS) and t he lower level components more tributary to subcortical circuits involving procedural learning (contention scheduling or CS). (C) 2000 Academic Press.