Abstract concepts: evidence from two neurodegenerative patients

The database contains the reaction times (RTs), expressed in milliseconds, of the lexical decision task of the 8 healthy controls  (columns from E to L)  and the 2 patients tested (columns M and N). The RTs are reported for the 120 words-pairs included in the experiment, created combining prime and target belonging to different categories and specifically to the concrete categories of animals and tools and to the abstract categories of emotions, social and quantity. One patient showed an abolished priming effect for social concepts and the other one for quantity-related concepts, respectively. This double dissociation suggests a role of different brain areas in representing specific abstract categories, giving insights for current semantic memory theories.