Relative category-specific preservation in semantic dementia? Evidence from 35 cases

Category-specific deficits have rarely been reported in semantic dementia (SD). To our knowledge, only four previous studies have documented category-specific deficits, and these have focused on the living versus non-living things contrast rather than on more fine-grained semantic categories. This study aimed to determine whether a category-specific effect could be highlighted by a semantic sorting task administered to 35 SD patients once at baseline and again after 2 years and to 10 Alzheimer's disease patients (AD). We found a relative preservation of fruit and vegetables only in SD. This relative preservation of fruit and vegetables could be considered with regard to the importance of color knowledge in their discrimination. Indeed, color knowledge retrieval is known to depend on the left posterior fusiform gyrus which is relatively spared in SD. Finally, according to predictions of semantic memory models, our findings best fitted the Devlin and Gonnerman's computational account.