The validity and origin of category effects in the anomia demonstrated by individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) remains controversial. Twenty DAT subjects were tested with picture naming and semantic association judgment tests. Picture and word stimuli were drawn from biological, nonbiological, and actions-verbs categories, all of equal difficulty and previously normed on elderly controls. DAT subjects made significantly more naming and semantic judgment errors in the biological category than in the nonbiological category. They were relatively more accurate in naming and making judgments for actions-verbs when presented as words or as 5-s animations. When line drawings of actions were shown for naming, performance deteriorated significantly. Converging results from these 2 tasks provide strong evidence for a semantic memory impairment preferentially affecting biological items to a greater extent than nonbiological items or action verbs in DAT.
Traditionally, phenomenal consciousness has been restricted to the realm of perceptual and otherwise sensory experiences. If there is a kind of phenomenology altogether unlike sensory phenomenology, then this was a mistake, and requires an accounting. I argue such cognitive phenomenology exists by appealing to a phenomenal contrast case that relies on meaningful and relatively meaningless dialogue. I explain why previous phenomenal contrast arguments are less likely to be effective on even neutral parties to the debate: these arguments rely on a 'hard-to-understand' sentence, which may elicit sensory crutches that one focuses on, thereby obscuring cognitive phenomenology. I argue for a positive characterization of the phenomenal contrast in terms of seeming to be aware of abstract relations that obtain between different contributions in a dialogue. This paves the way for arguing that what it's like to entertain a cognitive content that p differs from that of q in their cognitive phenomenology.
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