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N S Foldi

Publications and source records attributed to N S Foldi.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Selective attention skills in Alzheimer's disease: performance on graded cancellation tests varying in density and complexity.

Nine selective cancellation tasks were administered to nine subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD), nine elderly control, and eight depressed subjects. Each task consisted of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper containing line drawings of geometric shapes that were identified as either targets or distractors. The nine forms of the task varied along two independent graded dimensions: (1) the total number of items in the field (Density: 3 levels) and (2) the number of different distractors in the surround (Complexity: 3 levels). Performance of the AD group was worse than that of the other groups, and performance for all groups declined with density. Error analysis of the impaired performance of the AD subjects showed that they made errors of omission that differed significantly as a function of density. There was no evidence that they could adopt a chunking strategy to accommodate the increased load.

Aged↗
PubMed1987

Appreciation of pragmatic interpretations of indirect commands: comparison of right and left hemisphere brain-damaged patients.

Indirect commands can elicit "literal" interpretations, directly reflecting the content and form of the utterance, or "pragmatic" interpretations, incorporating knowledge of paralinguistic, social, or historical cues. The aim of this study was to demonstrate how right brain-damaged (RBD) subjects would perform on judgments of these forms of communication. It was predicted that relative to normal controls or aphasic subjects, the RBD subjects would have significant difficulty appreciating the pragmatic interpretation relative to the literal one. Subjects judged the appropriateness of two-part exchanges consisting of indirect commands, direct commands, Wh-questions coupled with pragmatic responses, literal responses, responses verifying the physical surround, or syntactically similar responses. The results confirm that the RBD subjects had a selective difficulty appreciating the indirect commands. Their preference of literal over pragmatic interpretations was significantly different to that of aphasics or normal controls. Hypotheses are offered to explain these data.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1979

Lexical semantics and memory for words in aphasia.

Aphasic and non-neurological patients were assessed on a word recognition memory task. On any one trial, some words were instances of the same superordinate category, thus presupposing a common abstract conceptual feature, and some words could be linked thematically in the sense of forming context-dependent relations. Observing the temporal order in which patients pointed to the words they recognized permitted an assessment of the extent to which they clustered their responses either in terms of superordinate categories or along thematic lines. The conceptual structures indicated by these clusters were compared with those observed in a previous task requiring judgments of word relatedness. The data suggest that verbal memory limitations in aphasia are only in part linked to constraints on the conceptual features structuring lexical knowledge; and relatedly they raise the possibility that aphasics may have a disturbance of mnemonic processing quite apart from any disruption to language.

Adult↗