Neural correlates of narrative discourse in mild cognitive impairment

The goal of the proposal is to identify the association of different narrative perseverations features in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subtypes with their neural oscillatory profiles.

MCI patients show moderately impaired performance on neuropsychological tests but relatively intact global cognition and daily functioning. Validated as different from both normal ageing and dementia, MCI is a risk factor for the development of dementia. The evolving profile to dementia of MCI subtypes is a largely debated issue.

MCI patients typically show narrative perseverations in conversations, i.e. reiterations of their own previous narrations.

According to literature, perseverations have been studied as test responses in the context of dementia but have not been systematically explored as speech of MCI patients. Recent studies suggest that different oscillatory responses can be observed in different MCI subtypes.

However, no effort has been attempted so far to relate such oscillation profiles to linguistic patterns in the speech production of MCI patients.

The present action is, therefore, to investigate whether different narrative perseveration subtypes can be associated with distinct neural patterns (oscillatory profiles).