Purpose According to the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH), difficulties in the procedural learning (PL) system may contribute to the language difficulties observed in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method Fifteen children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers were compared on visual PL tasks—specifically, deterministic serial reaction time (SRT) tasks. In the first experiment, children with SLI and their TD peers performed the classical SRT task using a keyboard as response mode. In the second experiment, they performed the same SRT task but gave their responses through a touchscreen (instead of a keyboard) to reduce the motor and cognitive demands of the task. Results Although in Experiment 1 , children with SLI demonstrated learning, they were slower and made more errors than did their TD peers. Nevertheless, these relative weaknesses disappeared when the nature of the response mode changed ( Experiment 2 ). Conclusions In this study, the authors report that children with SLI may exhibit sequential learning. Moreover, the generally slower reaction times observed in previous deterministic SRT studies may be explained by the response mode used. Thus, our findings are not consistent with the predictions of the PDH, and these findings suggest that language impairments in SLI are not sustained by poor procedural learning abilities.

Relying on procedural memory is a promising approach for interventions that address the cognitive difficulties found in semantic dementia. The aim of this study was to determine if procedural memory could be used to optimise learning of relevant smartphone functions in MH, a 55-year-old man with semantic dementia. The impact of learning to use specific smartphone applications, which display concepts and their semantic characteristics, on relearning useful significant concepts, was also explored in MH. This patient, who showed no deficits in procedural learning on a serial reaction time paradigm, was able to learn manipulations related to 15 smartphone functions although, because of his deficit in word comprehension, he generally needed verbal cues to clarify which functions he was asked to perform. Six months after the end of the intervention, he was still using 8 of the 15 functions regularly. However, repeated exposure to concepts through the use of two applications did not improve naming or retrieval of semantic attributes. This study showed the potential of relying on procedural memory to optimise learning of new technologies in the ecological rehabilitation of semantic dementia.

Identifying the conditions favoring new procedural skill learning in Alzheimer's disease (AD) could be important for patients' autonomy. It has been suggested that error elimination is beneficial during skill learning, but no study has explored the advantage of this method in sequential learning situations. In this study, we examined the acquisition of a 6-element perceptual-motor sequence by AD patients and healthy older adults (control group). We compared the impact of two preliminary sequence learning conditions (Errorless versus Errorful) on Serial Reaction Time performance at two different points in the learning process. A significant difference in reaction times for the learned sequence and a new sequence was observed in both conditions in healthy older participants; in AD patients, the difference was significant only in the errorless condition. The learning effect was greater in the errorless than the errorful condition in both groups. However, while the errorless advantage was found at two different times in the learning process in the AD group, in the control group this advantage was observed only at the halfway point. These results support the hypothesis that errorless learning allows for faster automation of a procedure than errorful learning in both AD and healthy older subjects.

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présente étude consistait, d'une part, a `évaluer le développement des capacités d'inhibition chez l'enfant âgé de 5 a `11 ans a `l'aide du Stroop-Fruits (Archibald & Kerns, 1999;Catale & Meulemans, 2005) et, d'autre part, a `examiner la validité et la sensibilité de cet outil auprès d'une population clinique. Pour ce faire, 346 enfants francophones, sans troubles neurodéveloppementaux et sans difficultés d'apprentissage ont été inclus dans cette étude. Un groupe de 25 enfants présentant un trouble déficitaire de l'attention avec ou sans hyperactivité a également été évalué. Les résultats de l'étude développementale montrent une amélioration des performances pour la condition d'interférence entre 5 et 8 ans. En outre, l'étude clinique montre que les enfants TDAH commettent significativement plus d'erreurs que le groupe de contrôle dans la condition d'interférence, confirmant ainsi la sensibilité clinique de cet outil.

The interplay between stability and manoeuvrability is fundamental for human walking. Previous research finds conflicting perspectives on how these attributes interact - mechanisms for stable walking can either facilitate or impede manoeuvrability. We postulate that these views can be explained by considering manoeuvre direction. We hypothesize that adopting gait patterns that increase lateral stability will impede laterally-directed manoeuvres but not medially-directed manoeuvres due to body positioning strategies that resist lateral movements but aid in the ability to actively generate medially-directed external moments. Twenty-four participants performed many repetitions of a discrete stepping task involving mid-trial reactive manoeuvres in both a Baseline (no external perturbations) and Complex (random perturbations applied to their pelvis) environment. We found that in the Complex environment all participants increased their lateral margin of stability when compared to the Baseline environment. This resulted in an increase in manoeuvre reaction time and foot placement error for laterally-directed manoeuvres but not for medially-directed manoeuvres in the Complex environment when compared to the Baseline environment. These results support our hypothesis and provide the novel interpretation that the stability-manoeuvrability trade-off during human walking depends on manoeuvre direction.

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