Representations of knowledge about dominoes in demented and normal elderlyplayers

1. Dementia patients who retain musical and game-playing skills exhibit imp aired performance on explicit memory tests of knowledge about their retaine d skill. 2. Dementia patients who retain skill at playing dominoes can answer comple x questions about the play of the game almost as well as normal elderly dom ino players when the questions are presented with real dominoes. 3. The aim of this study was to determine if skilled dementia patients coul d answer questions about domino play when the stimuli were two-dimensional drawings of dominoes. 4. Seventeen dementia patients and eight normal elderly domino players were tested on two forms of the Domino Quiz: first with real dominoes, then wit h two-dimensional drawings; other neuropsychological tests were given at th e same time. 5. Fourteen of the 17 patients and all of the controls showed no decline in answering questions about domino play when two-dimensional drawings were u sed. These patients showed retained symbolic processing of information abou t dominoes despite declines in overall mental status, generation of words f rom specific semantic categories, and recognition memory for domino termino logy. 6. Because the 14 patients with retained domino skill performed as accurate ly as controls on both administrations of a letter cancellation task, the a bility to process familiar symbols may be important to their game-playing s kill.