Multiple learning tasks in patients with ideomotor apraxia.

The Authors studied a group of patients with ideomotor apraxia (LBD+) to verify if these patients had some difficulties in multiple learning tasks in respect to non-apraxic patients and normal control subjects. All five groups were submitted to gesture learning task, motor skill learning task, supra-span (Corsi) learning task. The results indicate that learning difficulties were present in LBD+ patients, as demonstrated by their low performance in gesture sequence, motor skill and score of block-tapping supra-span task. This fact may be seen as a basic learning deficit and therefore linked to memory impairment. On the other hand, this could be tied to an aspecific more diffuse deterioration of attention if we consider that our apraxic patients had a greater cerebral lesion than non-apraxic patients.