Graphic Skills as a Diagnostic Tool For Working with the Elderly

Abstract

Graphic skills may reveal a dementia process in progress. The observations are based upon about 1,500 aged subjects (>75), half of them with cognitive deficiency and the other without, residing in central Stockholm. The intention of this study was to develop a simple, non-verbal screening method for subjects with social and/or cognitive disorders. Graphic competence was compared with cognitive capacity. Geometric copying, handwriting and freehand figure-drawing capacities were shown to drop in a prescribed order with decreasing cognitive functioning. Copying a three-dimensional cube was the most sensitive to cognitive derangements, and signature writing the least sensitive. These two tasks represent the extremes of a scale which also included performance on other copying tasks including handwriting ability and freehand figurative drawing. As a whole, the proposed graphic test technique seems less sensitive to cultural and educational factors, including verbal factors, than ordinary measurement of mental functioning.