Continuous figure recognition in dementia and unilateral cerebral damage.

By means of continuous figure recognition (CFR) using visual pictorial, geometric and nonsense material demented patients could easily be distinguished from vascular controls without dementia and healthy subjects. In cases of infarction in the territory of the middle cerebral artery the hemisphere affected was only a minor determinant of overall scores. Within aphasics there was a tendency for the CFR results to reflect the severity of aphasia being most severely impaired in global aphasics. When aphasics and other cerebrally impaired patients, judged clinically to suffer from memory impairment, were considered as a group, CFR performance was lower than in those without apparent memory problems for the pictures only. It is concluded that CFR is a sensitive indicator of defective memory and/or gross brain lesions and that it is relatively independent of linguistic mediation.