Apport de l'évaluation de la cognition dans une tâche de vie quotidienne chez des patients cérébrolésés : génération et exécution d'un script de cuisine

Abstract

Objective Assessment of executive functions in an everyday life activity, evaluating brain injury subjects with script generation and execution tasks. Materials and methods We compared a script generation task to a script execution task, whereby subjects had to make a cooked dish. Two grids were used for the quotation, qualitative and quantitative, as well as the calculation of an anosognosis score. We checked whether the execution task was more sensitive to a dysexecutive disorder than the script generation task and compared the scores obtained in this evaluation with those from classical frontal tests. Twelve subjects with brain injury 6 years ± 4.79 ago and 12 healthy control subjects were tested. The subjects carried out a script generation task whereby they had to explain the necessary stages to make a chocolate cake. They also had to do a script execution task corresponding to the cake making. Results The 2 quotation grids were operational and complementary. The quantitative grid is more sensitive to a dysexecutive disorder. The brain injury subjects made more errors in the execution task. Conclusion It is important to evaluate the executive functions of subjects with brain injury in everyday life tasks, not just in psychometric or script-generation tests. Indeed the ecological realization of a very simple task can reveal executive function difficulties such as the planning or the sequencing of actions, which are under-evaluated in laboratory tests.