It is generally accepted that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge of famous people. The specific roles of the right and left temporal lobe remain a subject of debate, with some studies suggesting differential roles based on modality (visual versus verbal information) and others category (person knowledge versus general semantics). The present study re-examined performance of semantic dementia patients with predominantly right and predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy on famous face, famous name and general semantic tasks, with the specific aim of testing the hypothesis that the right temporal lobe has a privileged role for person knowledge and the left temporal lobe for general semantic knowledge. Comparisons of performance rankings across tasks showed no evidence to support this hypothesis. By contrast, there was robust evidence from naming, identification and familiarity measures for modality effects: right-sided atrophy being associated with relatively greater impairment for faces and visual tasks and left-sided atrophy for names and verbal tasks. A double dissociation in test scores in two patients reinforced these findings. The data present a challenge for the influential &#x2018;semantic hub&#x2019; model, which views the anterior temporal lobes as an area of convergence in which semantic information is represented in amodal form.

Julie S. Snowden

Jennifer C. Thompson

David Neary

Famous People Knowledge and the Right and Left Temporal Lobes

Background: Visual delta event-related (ERO) and evoked oscillations (EO) of Alzheimer patients (AD) are different than healthy. In the present study, the analysis is extented to include auditory ERO and EO in AD. The rationale is to reveal whether the auditory ERO delta responses are also reduced, and whether this is a general phenomenon in Alzheimer patients upon applying stimuli with cognitive load.Methods: Thirty-four mild AD subjects (17 de-novo and 17 medicated (cholinergic)) and seventeen healthy controls were included. Auditory oddball paradigm and sensory auditory stimuli were applied to the subjects. Oscillatory responses were analyzed by measuring maximum amplitudes in delta frequency range (0.5&#x2013;3.5 Hz).Results: Auditory delta ERO (0.5&#x2013;3.5 Hz) responses of healthy controls were higher than either de-novo AD or medicated AD group, without a difference between two AD subgroups. Furthermore, the auditory EO after presentation of tone bursts yielded no group difference.Conclusion: Our findings imply that delta ERO is highly unstable in AD patients in comparison to age-matched healthy controls only during the cognitive paradigm. Our results favor the hypothesis that neural delta networks are activated during cognitive tasks and that the reduced delta response is a general phenomenon in AD, due to cognitive impairment.

G. G. Yener

B. G&#xfc;ntekin

D. Necioglu &#xd6;rken

E. T&#xfc;lay

H. Forta

E. Ba&#x15f;ar

Auditory Delta Event-Related Oscillatory Responses are Decreased in Alzheimer&#x2019;s Disease

Facundo Manes

Topics in Dementia: Papers from the WFN-RGACD 2010 Meeting

Patients with frontotemporal dementia (both behavioural variant [bvFTD] and semantic dementia [SD]) as well as those with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show deficits on tests of face emotion processing, yet the mechanisms underlying these deficits have rarely been explored. We compared groups of patients with bvFTD (n = 17), SD (n = 12) or AD (n = 20) to an age- and education-matched group of healthy control subjects (n = 36) on three face emotion processing tasks (Ekman 60, Emotion Matching and Emotion Selection) and found that all three patient groups were similarly impaired. Analyses of covariance employed to partial out the influences of language and perceptual impairments, which frequently co-occur in these patients, provided evidence of different underlying cognitive mechanisms. These analyses revealed that language impairments explained the original poor scores obtained by the SD patients on the Ekman 60 and Emotion Selection tasks, which involve verbal labels. Perceptual deficits contributed to Emotion Matching performance in the bvFTD and AD patients. Importantly, all groups remained impaired on one task or more following these analyses, denoting a primary emotion processing disturbance in these dementia syndromes. These findings highlight the multifactorial nature of emotion processing deficits in patients with dementia.

Laurie A. Miller

Sharpley Hsieh

Suncica Lah

Sharon Savage

John R. Hodges

Olivier Piguet

One Size Does Not Fit All: Face Emotion Processing Impairments in Semantic Dementia, Behavioural-Variant Frontotemporal Dementia and Alzheimer&#x2019;s Disease Are Mediated by Distinct Cognitive Deficits

The appropriate mathematical model for the problem space of tower transformation tasks is the state graph representing positions of discs or balls and their moves. Graph theoretical quantities like distance, eccentricities or degrees of vertices and symmetries of graphs support the choice of problems, the selection of tasks and the analysis of performance of subjects whose solution paths can be projected onto the graph. The mathematical model is also at the base of a computerized test tool to administer various types of tower tasks.

Andreas M. Hinz

Graph Theory of Tower Tasks

Despite a vast literature examining semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD), consensus regarding the nature of the deficit remains elusive. We re-considered this issue in the context of a framework that assumes semantic cognition can break down in two ways: (1) core semantic representations can degrade or (2) cognitive control mechanisms can become impaired [1]. We hypothesised and confirmed that the nature of semantic impairment in AD changes with disease severity. Patients at mild or severe stages of the disorder exhibited impairment across various semantic tasks but the nature of those deficits differed qualitatively for the two groups. Commensurate with early dysfunction of the cognitive control, temporoparietal-frontal-cingulate network, characteristics of deregulated semantic cognition were exhibited by the mild AD cases. In contrast, the severe AD group reproduced features of additional degradation of core semantic representations. These results suggest that spread of pathology into lateral anterior temporal lobes in later stage AD produces degradation of semantic representations, exacerbating the already deregulated system. Moreover, the dual nature of severe patients&#x2019; impairment was highlighted by disproportionately poor performance on tasks placing high demand on both conceptual knowledge and control processes&#x2013;e.g., category fluency.

Faye Corbett

Elizabeth Jefferies

Alistair Burns

Matthew A. Lambon Ralph

Unpicking the Semantic Impairment in Alzheimer&#x2019;s Disease: Qualitative Changes with Disease Severity

We sought to investigate the decision making profile of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) by assessing patients diagnosed with this disease (n = 10), patients diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n = 35), and matched controls (n = 14) using the Iowa Gambling Task, a widely used test that mimics real-life decision making. Participants were also evaluated with a complete neuropsychological battery. Patients with PPA were unable to adopt an advantageous strategy on the IGT, which resulted in a flat performance, different to that exhibited by both controls (who showed advantageous decision making) and bvFTD patients (who showed risk-appetitive behavior). The decision making profile of PPA patients was not associated with performance on language tasks and did not differ between sub-variants of the disease (namely, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia). Investigating decision making in PPA is crucial both from a theoretical perspective, as it can shed light about the way in which language interacts with other cognitive functions, as well as a clinical standpoint, as it could lead to a more objective detection of impairments of decision making deficits in this condition.

Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht

Teresa Torralva

Mar&#xed;a Roca

Daniela Szenkman

Agustin Ibanez

Pablo Richly

Mari&#xe1;ngeles Pose

Decision Making Cognition in Primary Progressive Aphasia

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Behavioural Neurology

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Papers are published upon acceptance, regardless of the Special Issue publication date.

Behavioural Neurology

Topics in Dementia

Topics in Dementia

Articles

Famous People Knowledge and the Right and Left Temporal Lobes

Auditory Delta Event-Related Oscillatory Responses are Decreased in Alzheimer’s Disease

Topics in Dementia: Papers from the WFN-RGACD 2010 Meeting

One Size Does Not Fit All: Face Emotion Processing Impairments in Semantic Dementia, Behavioural-Variant Frontotemporal Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease Are Mediated by Distinct Cognitive Deficits

Graph Theory of Tower Tasks

Unpicking the Semantic Impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease: Qualitative Changes with Disease Severity

Decision Making Cognition in Primary Progressive Aphasia