Cognitive Approach to the Assessment of Limb Apraxia

Abstract

A new instrument for the assessment of the different levels of gesture processing, as identified by recent cognitive models of apraxia, is presented. The battery comprises thirteen tasks—eight assess the production of meaningful gestures both on command and on imitation, four tasks assess the ability to recognize and identify gestures, and one task assesses imitation of meaningless gestures. The battery encompasses a novel test of gesture production on visual command. A total of 60 healthy British volunteers were tested with the entire battery. On the whole, participants made more errors with pantomimes than with other tasks. Their scores served as norms.

Keywords:

• Assessment
• Cognitive model
• Gestures
• Limb apraxia

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are extremely grateful to Claudio Villa who drew all the pictures used in the test battery. We also thank Claire Spivey for amending the English.

Notes

Number of errors produced by the 60 participants in pantomiming on command (with verbal, visual, or tactile input) the use of the stimulus objects. The stimuli with asterisks are excluded from the final version of the battery.

Range, means, and standard deviations of the scores achieved by the 60 participants in tasks assessing the production and the recognition of intransitive gestures and pantomimes. Cut-off scores are in bold. For the remaining tasks, all the 60 participants performed at ceiling in the production of transitive gestures (16/16), and in the imitation of intransitive gestures (16/16), pantomimes (16/16), and meaningless gestures (20/20). The tasks assessing the identification of both intransitive gestures and pantomimes were also executed at ceiling (16/16 for each type of gesture).