[Concepts of the relationship between dementia and depression in Weingartner's works: a critical study]

The School of Weingartner has construct a theoretical framework for defining cognition, in which changes in cognitive performance may be related to alterations in "intrinsic" cognitive processes (episodic memory, semantic memory, processes requiring effort or performed more automatically) or non cognitive "extrinsic" processes (sensitivity to reinforcement, arousal/activation, sensorimotor capabilities, mood). The empiric fertility of this pattern enriches our knowledges about depression and dementia. It is able to describe suitably some relevant facts under the view of a systemization and to support the idea that the component processes of memory are psychobiologically distinct. One cannot nevertheless ignore the issue of the value of the cognitive categories produced. It is possible to judge the episodic memory by the semantic memory? The basis on which the latter is measured is more restrictive than the basis upon which it was originally defined; the quantitative experiments don't take into account the modalities of the realization of the meaning. The notion of effort is still an area of investigation more than an enrichment of answers. It must be closely related to the notion of anticipation and take care of the spatiotemporal presentations from which the thought organizes the stimuli and adapts itself to the content of cognition in the circumstances of the experiment. A place must be done especially in dementia in the limits of the paradigmatic power of that pattern and in the criterions of exclusion separating the demented/-non depressed from the demented/depressed subjects.