TY - JOUR
T1 - The importance of multiple assessments of object knowledge in semantic dementia
T2 - The case of the familiar objects task
AU - Chrysikou, G.
AU - Giovannetti, Tania
AU - Wambach, Denene M.
AU - Lyon, Abigail C.
AU - Grossman, Murray
AU - Libon, David J.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by grants AG17586, AG15116, and NS44266 from the National Institutes of Health to MG. The authors would like to thank Katy Cross, Shaleigh Kwok, and Shweta Antani for their assistance in the collection of the neuropsychological assessment of the patients diagnosed at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Jamie J. Reilly and Christopher H. Ramey for valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
PY - 2011/2
Y1 - 2011/2
N2 - Semantic dementia (SD) is characterized by a dramatic loss of conceptual knowledge about the meaning of words and the identity of objects. Previous research has suggested that SD patients' knowledge is differentially influenced by the disease and may decline at different degrees depending on a patient's everyday familiarity with certain items. However, no study has examined (a) semantic knowledge deterioration and (b) the potential significance of autobiographical experience for the maintenance of object concepts in the same cohort of SD patients by using comprehensive assessments of different aspects of object knowledge across an experience-based, distributed semantic memory network. Here, we tested four SD patients and three Alzheimer's disease (AD) control patients using a range of tasks - including naming, gesture generation, and autobiographical knowledge - with personally familiar objects or perceptually similar or different object analogs. Our results showed dissociations between performance on naming relative to other assessments of object knowledge between SD and AD patients, though we did not observe a reliable familiar objects advantage. We discuss different factors that may account for these findings, as well as their implications for research on SD.
AB - Semantic dementia (SD) is characterized by a dramatic loss of conceptual knowledge about the meaning of words and the identity of objects. Previous research has suggested that SD patients' knowledge is differentially influenced by the disease and may decline at different degrees depending on a patient's everyday familiarity with certain items. However, no study has examined (a) semantic knowledge deterioration and (b) the potential significance of autobiographical experience for the maintenance of object concepts in the same cohort of SD patients by using comprehensive assessments of different aspects of object knowledge across an experience-based, distributed semantic memory network. Here, we tested four SD patients and three Alzheimer's disease (AD) control patients using a range of tasks - including naming, gesture generation, and autobiographical knowledge - with personally familiar objects or perceptually similar or different object analogs. Our results showed dissociations between performance on naming relative to other assessments of object knowledge between SD and AD patients, though we did not observe a reliable familiar objects advantage. We discuss different factors that may account for these findings, as well as their implications for research on SD.
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U2 - 10.1080/13554794.2010.497156
DO - 10.1080/13554794.2010.497156
M3 - Article
C2 - 20812137
AN - SCOPUS:78751627052
VL - 17
SP - 57
EP - 75
JO - Neurocase
JF - Neurocase
SN - 1355-4794
IS - 1
ER -