We used a novel apparatus called the flags
board to elicit similarity judgments from 32 Alzheimer's
disease (AD) patients and 32 elderly normal (EN) controls
for two 12-member conceptual domains, ANIMALS and (musical)
INSTRUMENTS. Based on Pathfinder and multidimensional scaling
(MDS) analyses, performance by AD patients was nearly identical
to that of EN controls for ANIMALS. Performance differed
for INSTRUMENTS, but the AD group's Pathfinder network
was found to agree with the intuitions of a panel of 18
raters as well as the EN group's. MDS analysis showed
no deficit on abstract dimensions for the AD group, for
either domain. The results are discussed in the context
of degradation versus preservation of semantic
memory in AD. (JINS, 1999, 5, 676–684.)
