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Abstract
Dressing ability was studied in 25 subjects suffering from senile dementia of Alzheimer's type (SDAT). Performance was assessed by means of the Action Coding System of Schwartz et al. (1991, 1995) and a modified version of Optimage (Gendron & Lévesque, 1993). Results showed that impairments of dressing ability were common in SDAT. Global measures of performance were found to correlate with severity of dementia as measured by the Reisberg, Ferris, DeLeon, and Crook (1982) Global Deterioration Scale and the Mini Mental State Examination. More detailed analyses showed that errors were more frequent in fastening than in the other components of the sequence (selecting, orienting, putting on, and adjusting pieces of clothes). In mildly impaired subjects, the most common errors were incorrect choices of clothing and unsatisfactory executions of basic action units, whereas in more severely impaired subjects, other kinds of error also occurred, mostly passivity. Methodological implications of these results are drawn for further cognitive analysis of everyday actions in SDAT.