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

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dc.contributor.authorGoranson, Tamara Elaine
dc.contributor.supervisorGraves, Roger Elliott
dc.date.accessioned2018-08-17T00:04:23Z
dc.date.available2018-08-17T00:04:23Z
dc.date.copyright2001en_US
dc.date.issued2018-08-16
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Psychologyen_US
dc.degree.levelDoctor of Philosophy Ph.D.en_US
dc.description.abstractA 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.en_US
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduateen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1828/9929
dc.languageEnglisheng
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.subjectAlzheimer's diseaseen_US
dc.subjectDiagnosisen_US
dc.subjectPsychologyen_US
dc.subjectAbstract thinkingen_US
dc.titleOn diagnosing Alzheimer's disease: assessing abstract thinking and reasoningen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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