On diagnosing Alzheimer's disease: assessing abstract thinking and reasoning

• Main Author: Goranson, Tamara Elaine
• Other Authors: Graves, Roger Elliott
• Format: Others
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Alzheimer's disease; Diagnosis; Psychology; Abstract thinking
• Online Access: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca//handle/1828/9929

A series of abstract thinking and reasoning tasks was administered to patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and a sample of nondemented older adults matched on age, education, and gender variables. The performance of the AD patients was inferior to control subjects on all verbal and nonverbal reasoning tests, including a newly developed test of analogical reasoning, the Goranson Analogy Test (GAT). Preliminary psychometric analyses of the GAT revealed very high internal consistency, good convergent and divergent validity, and adequate predictive validity. Further analyses revealed that reasoning with pictures was just as easy as reasoning with words for AD patients, indicating that modality of presentation has little effect on reasoning performance. Error analyses revealed no qualitative differences in performance between AD patients and nondemented controls. Taken together, the findings suggest that abstract thinking and reasoning abilities decline with the onset of Alzheimer's dementia. A neurocognitive model of analogical reasoning is proposed to account for the study findings. === Graduate