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What do Alzheimer's disease patients know about animals? It depends on task structure and presentation format

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2002

JILL B. RICH ,
NORMAN W. PARK ,
STEPHEN DOPKINS,  and
JASON BRANDT
JILL B. RICH
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, York University and Department of Psychology, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
NORMAN W. PARK
Affiliation:
Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit and Department of Psychology, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
STEPHEN DOPKINS,
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, George Washington University, Washington, DC
JASON BRANDT
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
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Abstract

Deficits on tasks requiring semantic memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD) may be due to storage loss, a retrieval deficit, or both. To address this question, we administered multiple tasks involving 9 exemplars of the category “animals,” presented as both words and pictures, to 12 AD patients and 12 nondemented individuals. Participants made semantic judgments by class (sorting task), similarity (triadic comparison task), and dimensional attributes (ordering task). Relative to control participants, AD patients were impaired on an unstructured sorting task, but did not differ on a constrained sorting task. On the triadic comparison task, the patients were as likely to make judgments based on size as domesticity attributes, whereas control participants made judgments based primarily on domesticity. The patients' judgments were also less consistent across tasks than those of control participants. On the ordering tasks, performance was generally comparable between groups with pictures but not words, suggesting that pictures enable AD patients to access information from semantic memory that is less accessible with lexical stimuli. These results suggest that AD patients' semantic judgments are impaired when the retrieval context is unstructured, but perform normally under supportive retrieval conditions. (JINS, 2002, 8, 83–94.)

Keywords

Alzheimer's diseaseSemantic memoryFormat effects
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2002 , pp. 83 - 94
Copyright
© 2002 The International Neuropsychological Society

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