On the Relationship Between Semantic Knowledge and Prejudice About Social Groups in Patients with Dementia

Patterns of brain-damaged individuals' deficits in categorizing living versus non-living things indicate separation of semantic knowledge categories in the brain. Recent work in patients with dementia suggested that semantic knowledge about social groups differs from knowledge about living and non-living things. In this study we analyzed patients' social appraisal by testing whether their degree of impairment in social-group knowledge predicted their social-group evaluative reactions (prejudice). We hypothesized that impaired knowledge about social groups would correlate with either heightened or reduced prejudice.