Browsing by Subject "skripti"

Goals. Event schema, also known as a script, contains information about a structure of a particular event; about the sequences of events and their temporal order. With the information the scripts contain, one can anticipate and plan for future events and actions. People with traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have difficulties in the verbal planning of actions. Previous international research has shown that the scripts produced by people with TBI contain fewer actions central to the schema, than scripts produced by healthy control subjects. The aim of this study is to examine what kind of scripts Finnish speaking subjects with TBI and their healthy control subject counterparts generate in a script generation task consisting of eight scripts. This study also examines whether the script type has influence on the features of the generated scripts. Methods. Fifteen subjects with TBI and fifteen healthy control subjects participated in the study. The researcher collected the research material during the spring and summer 2015. The research material consisted of the scripts generated by the subjects and control subjects, as well as the results of the control tasks (Boston Naming Test, Rapid Automatized Naming Test, semantic and phonemic fluencies). The subjects were asked to generate event schemas for eight everyday tasks belonging to four schema categories. The categories were 'open high frequency' (go shopping, go for a walk), 'open low frequency' (apply for a job, go on a vacation), 'closed high frequency' (make coffee, brush teeth), and 'closed low frequency' (go to a doctor, go to a restaurant). Closed scripts are related to events where the actions involved in their execution are well established and tightly related to each other. Open scripts are less structured and have loose connections between the actions involved. High and low frequency scripts differ on how frequent the event is. Time given for generating each script was 60 seconds. The scripts were scored for the total number of events produced, the number of event repetitions, the informativeness of the script, and the meaningfulness and the centrality of the events. The results of the qualitative analysis were displayed in a statistical form and analyzed with the non-parametrical Mann-Whitney U -test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that the scripts produced by the subjects with TBI were less informative and contained less actions than the scripts produced by the healthy control subjects, regardless of the script type. Closed scripts were found to be more informative than open scripts, and the subjects produced more actions to the closed than to the open scripts. When the high and low frequency scripts generated by the subjects with TBI were examined, no significant difference was found between the two script types. The results of this study can be explained by the disturbances in executive functions, and disturbances in the working memory as well as the episodic memory, all of which can affect the subject's ability to produce a coherent story and recall actions belonging to a certain event.

Goals. Event schema or a script is a knowledge structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. Script contains components which are vertically and horizontally connected to each other. A person may learn about scripts by personal experience, reading about them, hearing about them and seeing them done. Therefore, scripts contain information from episodic and semantic memory. Script research provides information about memory functions and the representation and the damage of the systems in different diseases affecting the neural systems, such as in Alzheimer's disease (AD). With increasing theoretical knowledge it is possible to develop differential diagnostic and rehabilitation methods for the patients in clinical work. The purpose of the study is to examine the script production of two different scripts in the mild and moderate stage of AD. Methods. The material of AD patients was gathered in 1994-1997 at the Department of Neurology (Memory Clinic) of the Helsinki University Central Hospital. The normal control subjects were from the pool of participants of the Helsinki Aging Brain Study which started in 1989. Ten people with mild AD (LiAT), ten with moderate AD (KoAT) and ten matched normal controls (NoI) were asked to produce as many script events as possible for two scripts: What do you do between waking up and having lunch? (The Morning script) representing episodic memory and What happens at a doctor's appointment? (The Doctor script) representing semantic memory. Sixty seconds were allotted for each script. The scripts were scored for the total number of events, the number of event repetitions, the informativeness of the contents and the plausibility and the centrality of the events. Statistical methods used were the Kruskal-Wallis one way variance analysis and the Mann-Whitney U –test post hoc –test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that the number of events for the both script types was statistically significantly lower for the people with AD compared to the control group. In addition, the ratio of informativeness was statistically significantly poorer for the people with AD. Depending on the script type, people with AD produced less plausible and central events than the control group. The results of the study are consistent in many aspects with the literature and the studies of AD suggesting that episodic memory is first impaired in AD, followed by the impairment of semantic memory.