Table 4.

Mental Capacities Inferred From Reported Episodes

Mental capacity	Example	Caregiver interpretation
Recognition of specific people/animals	Interviewee 6: A person living with dementia encounters her niece who is typically out of the house working odd hours. The person living with dementia unexpectedly says, “Oh, hi, [nickname]. What are you doing here today?”	According to the caregiver, the person living with dementia briefly recognized her niece. “Because the fact that she said, ‘What are you doing here today?’ She’s not normally there. […] and also just calling her [nickname]. Very few people call her [nickname]. That was just what my mom called her. In fact, nobody else calls her [nickname] except Mom. So those are just shades of her old self […]. I would’ve thought that that was her many years ago.”
Increased awareness of surroundings	Interviewee 7: When his son is leaning over a stair banister or edge of an elevated platform, a person living with dementia reacts by warning him to “be careful.” Once the caregiver is out of harm’s way, the person living with dementia ceases to engage in any sort of conversation and reverts into passivity.	According to the caregiver, the person living with dementia’s awareness of the surrounding environment returned when the caregiver was in dangerous situations, a phenomenon he found “bizarre.” “That type of [situation], you know, where harm will come to me, it just comes back. And I don’t know where it comes from, but it comes back, and he starts engaging right away. Then if I’m away from it, then it subsides, doesn’t ... He won’t continue on with the conversation after that.”
Increased capacity to understand others’ emotions or intentions	Interviewee 63: A person living with dementia hears her husband mumbling to himself about his frustration over a financial problem he is facing and says to him, “Don’t worry, you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”	According to the caregiver, the person living with dementia suddenly showed sensitivity to her husband’s visible stress. Caregiver compared this to when the person living with dementia sees her daughter on FaceTime and asks how her pregnancy is going, “… in those moments, there’s empathy. And there’s concern.” “I appreciated the fullness that she made a connection that she somehow was outside of herself and was thinking about someone else, that it was me, which was nice … for that moment, her world just got a little larger, it didn’t get smaller.”
Ability to form and pursue a goal	Interviewee 25: As part of a group art project, a person living with dementia creates an abstract watercolor painting. While other group members continue embellishing their paintings, the person living with dementia states that her painting is finished and explains the painting’s meaning to the group.	According to the caregiver, the person living with dementia suddenly seemed “wise” in this moment. The person living with dementia, he believed, demonstrated unusual insight into her creation and strong intentions for how it should look and what it should represent. “Other people were then embellishing their [paintings], doing all kinds of things that really kind of destroyed the purity of that central idea. The rest of the project, she refused to do it. She refused to mess with it. She took the first thing, put the paint, the pigment in the water, the image, and she would not touch it, change it. And everybody else was piling on glitter and gooey things. And she leaned over to me and she said, ‘Mine’s better.’”