Abstract
This article reports the findings from 3 patients with semantic dementia (SD) who were given a novel battery of 33 items from sensory quality categories (SQCs) as previously described by CitationBorgo and Shallice (2001; 2003) and CitationLaiacona, Capitani and Caramazza (2003). Their performance on three tasks (two naming, one word-to-picture matching) was compared with performance on similar tasks using a conventional semantic battery. At the group level, patients performed worse than age-matched controls overall, but neither group showed any differences in performance between domains (i.e., living, nonliving and SQCs). Individual patient analyses, however, showed contrasting profiles in the three patients. The results are discussed in terms of the SFT (CitationWarrington & Shallice, 1984) and individual differences (Lambon-Ralph et al., 2003) accounts of category-specificity in SD.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to John Hodges and Anna Adlam for access to and background data on Patient 1, and to Nick Fox and Jenny Whitwell for providing b) and c)