Wednesday, her group focused on texture. "What is that?" she asked, then suggested they touch their own hair and tell her what it felt like. Later, telling the story of a beautifully ornate piece of Chinese porcelain, she passed a smooth glass bowl around while they talked about what the porcelain would feel like, if they were allowed to touch it. "It feels like glass," Alice Shelton said of the bowl. But the porcelain, she opined, would be much finer than that. The painted trees, on the other hand, would be more like a rock Catherall pulled from the bag. "Rougher," Aoyagi said.

During this visit, Louisa Myers is having a ball. When she was in her early 80s, says granddaughter Ana Steele, a Neighborhood House program coordinator, she took up oil painting. She's chatting avidly about colors and meanings of a Susan Swartz painting with docent Anita Gander.

Virgil Howell is mostly quiet, but he seems captivated by one painting in particular.

"We do cognition activities sometimes at the day center and try to keep them interested and interacting," Steele says. "But they really talk a lot when they get here." Still, Gander notes that they talk more now that they're somewhat familiar and comfortable with the museum itself. But they don't interact much with each other.

It's like a tour a grade-school class might get, says Gander. Or, adds Catherall slyly, anyone who draws her as a guide. She doesn't believe that adults have enough time to touch and see and think in a museum. She tends to bag the lecture and take a more hands-on approach.

The museum staff hope their teachable, touchable tours will one day find a research partner who'd like to study whether the perceived benefits are real for those who have dementia.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com