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Updated: Aug 9, 2026
Assessment and Communication for People with Disorders of Consciousness
Published on: August 1, 2017
[Ecologic evaluation in the cognitive assessment of brain injury patients: generation and execution of script]
N Baguena1, C Thomas-Antérion, K Sciessere
1Centre d'accompagnement social et de rééducation neuropsychologique de l'Adapt-Rhône, CAJ, 39, rue du Père-Chevrier, 69007 Lyon, France.
Objective:
Assessment of executive functions in an everyday life activity, evaluating brain injury subjects with script generation and execution tasks.
Materials And Methods:
We compared a script generation task to a script execution task, whereby subjects had to make a cooked dish. Two grids were used for the quotation, qualitative and quantitative, as well as the calculation of an anosognosis score. We checked whether the execution task was more sensitive to a dysexecutive disorder than the script generation task and compared the scores obtained in this evaluation with those from classical frontal tests. Twelve subjects with brain injury 6 years+/-4.79 ago and 12 healthy control subjects were tested. The subjects carried out a script generation task whereby they had to explain the necessary stages to make a chocolate cake. They also had to do a script execution task corresponding to the cake making.
Results:
The 2 quotation grids were operational and complementary. The quantitative grid is more sensitive to a dysexecutive disorder. The brain injury subjects made more errors in the execution task.
Conclusion:
It is important to evaluate the executive functions of subjects with brain injury in everyday life tasks, not just in psychometric or script-generation tests. Indeed the ecological realization of a very simple task can reveal executive function difficulties such as the planning or the sequencing of actions, which are under-evaluated in laboratory tests.
