Mental representations of daily activities throughout the course of dementia

Since dementia is a result of cognitive rather than physical impairment, cognitive aspects are important for care planning. This mixed-model study aims to understand how the loss of cognitive functioning affects mental representations of daily activities.

Mental representations were assessed via the script generation task of daily activities (grocery shopping, dentist appointment, doing laundry, leaving the house, car accident) and a qualitative semi-structured interview from 25 people (age (mean: 67.64; SD: 23.625), gender (f: 14 (56%); m: 17 (68%)). Cognitive status was assessed via the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

Mental representations of daily activities loose content and get inaccurate throughout the disease (i.e. number of actions, abstractions, unemotional content) with poorer cognitive status. People with mild dementia report the most strategies and extend their mental representation by including strategies to circumvent experienced problems. Overall, mental representations of daily activities seem to be largely intact throughout the course of dementia (i.e. sequencing, personalisations, intrusions, examples, emotional content).

This study outlines that even though the content of mental representations decreases with dementia, the mental representations themselves remain in good order. Performance of daily activities throughout dementia may be hampered by the loss of content of the generated actions.