A Behavioral Study on Angle Discrimination and Sorting by Fingertip Touch

Dementia is a kind of cognitive impairment, diagnostic methods and therapies are not well established at present. For the early detection of dementia, this study investigated the aging effect between young people and the elderly in sorting experiment of angular chips which is simpler than conventional angle discriminating devices. The content of the experiment is to touch the angle chip with the fingertips and rearrange them in the order of the degree of the angle. There are two types experiments in this study, small angles and large angles. Angles of 20° to 60° were presented at 2° intervals, angles of 60° to 150° were presented at 5° intervals, and angle chips at the left and right ends were fixed, respectively. Experiments showed that the elderly had greater errors than younger people. According to the results of the experiment, the aging effect was confirmed. In addition, it was possible to shorten the experimental time as compared with the conventional apparatus. Also, by targeting patients with dementia, it can be expected that the error will be further larger than in healthy elderly people. In order to make this device one of the methods of dementia diagnosis, it is necessary to further experiment and study in the future.