The present study proposes a simple method for screening early signs of derangement in higher cortical functions in aged subjects. This instrument may reveal a dementia process in progress. About five hundred aged subjects took part in the present investigation, half cognitively deficient and half controls. They were all residing in central Stockholm and were screened for cognitive functioning by means of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) followed by simple graphic tests. Graphic competence was compared with mental capacity and it was shown to decrease in a fixed 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 some other copying tasks (a circle, two rectangles, a rhombus and two pentagons), handwriting ability (writing a spontaneous sentence and writing from dictation), and on free-hand figurative drawing (a dressed man or woman from the front). These latter three types of graphic functioning did not differ significantly from each other, and thus seemed interchangeable. As a whole, the proposed graphic test technique seems less sensetive to cultural and educational factors, including verbal factors, when compared to the ordinary measuremets of mental functioning