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Biomedical subjects

E Capitani

Publications and source records attributed to E Capitani.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1981

Intelligence and left hemisphere disease. The role of aphasia, apraxia and size of lesion.

The Raven Progressive Matrices and four subtests of the Wechsler-Bellevue Performance Scale were given to 173 left hemisphere patients subdivided according to presence/absence, type (fluent/non-fluent) and severity (moderate/severe) of aphasia. Constructive and ideomotor apraxia scores and CT scan data of each subject entered the statistical analysis. Factors significant in producing a low score on Progressive Matrices and Wechsler-Bellevue were presence of aphasia and constructive apraxia. Site and size of lesion per se failed to account for the intelligence scores. The relationship between aphasia, apraxia, intelligence test scores, and CT scan data were discussed in an attempt to clarify the meaning of these low intelligence test scores in aphasics and to assess the underlying roles of the brain lesions in this deficit. It appears that there are a number of methodological difficulties complicating interpretation of the intellectual deficit based on the Progressive Matrices and Wechsler-Bellevue scores, since performance on these tests is adversely affected by both aphasia and apraxia.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1980

Factors influencing type and severity of aphasia.

The influence of etiology and sex on aphasia type and the relation of age to the severity and type of language disorders have been assessed in 718 right-handed aphasic patients. Both trauma and neoplasia are associated with fluent aphasia significantly more often, while sex proved to have no influence on aphasia type. The frequency distribution of age according to type and severity of aphasia - studied in vascular patients only (N = 566) - demonstrated that fluency and severity are significantly associated with older age.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1980

The hemispheric side of neocortical damage does not affect memory for unidimensional position. An experiment wih Posner and Konick's test.

The role of neocortical areas in visuo-spatial memory was investigated by testing unilateral hemisphere-damaged patients for their ability to reproduce the position of a dot on a horizontal line after a delay. One hundred and eleven patients, divided into 4 groups on the basis of the side of damage and of the presence or absence of visual field defects, and 56 controls were tested. There were 2 sets of experimental conditions: (i) a free delay condition of 0, 20 or 180 sec., and (ii) a 20 sec. delay condition filled with 2 kinds of interpolated perceptual activity. Forgetting was significantly affected by presence of hemisphere damage, but not by the side and the intrahemispheric locus of lesion. It was concluded that the memory ability involved by this task is not related to the functioning of a specific cortical area.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Influence of rehabilitation on language skills in aphasic patients. A controlled study.

The influence of language rehabilitation on specific language skills (speaking, understanding, writing, and reading) was investigated in 281 aphasic patients (162 reeducated and 119 controls) who were subjected to a second examination no less than six months after the first. The relationship of the following factors to improvement was studied: (a) time between onset of aphasia and first examination; (b) type of aphasia; (c) overall severity of aphasia on first examination; (d) presence or absence of rehabilitation between first and subsequent examination. It was found that rehabilitation has a significant positive effect on improvement in all language skills. Time between onset and first examination and overall severity of aphasia were negatively related to improvement. The relationship of type of asphasia to improvement was not significant. Additional evidence of the efficacy of rehabilitation is provided by experience with patients who began language therapy several months or years after the onset of their language disorder.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Association of glycerol to dexamethasone in treatment of stroke patients.

A prospective study of 93 acute stroke patients randomly selected by type of antiedema treatment given (hypertonic glicerol infusion plus dexamethasone versus dexamethasone alone) failed to elicit any statistically significant difference between the two treatments on survival rates and quality of survival 7 and 30 days after the stroke.

Aged↗
PubMed1979

Direction of spatial error in the copying of visual stimuli: the relevance of focal brain damage.

Hemisphere-damaged patients and control subjects were tested by copying visual stimuli from a large display. The vertical and horizontal components of the errors and the overall accuracy were analysed with the following results: (i) all the subjects displaced downward in the left half of the display and upward in the right half, except for the left hemisphere-damaged patients with visual field defect, (ii) both left and right hemisphere-damaged patients with visual field defect displaced the copied point toward the damaged hemisphere, and generally were inaccurate only in the half of the copying set opposite to the damage hemisphere, without asymmetry between the effect of left and right posterior lesion except for the presence of unilateral neglect only among subjects with right hemisphere lesions.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1978

A preliminary experiment on long-term memory with realistic and abstract visual patterns in uniltateral focal hemisphere-damaged patients.

Sixty-seven focal hemisphere-damaged patients (38 to the left hemisphere and 29 to the right hemisphere) were tested for forgetting of realistic and abstract visual patterns over a 40-sec to 5-min interval by means of a recognition task. No forgetting took place in any group, even if abstract patterns proved to be poorly recognized both at 40 sec and at 5 min. The authors conclude that focal neocortical unilateral lesions do not significantly hamper the semantic code processes involved in the Long-Term Memory of the patterns employed in this experiment.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Do focal neocortical lesions hamper short-term recognition of visual spatial patterns?

A hundred and forty-three patients with focal - mainly neocortical - hemiphere-damage (subdivided in 4 groups according to the side of the damaged hemisphere and the presence/absence of visual field defect) and 70 controls, were given a 20-sec delay recognition test of complex spatial visual patterns. There was one free delay condition and two conditions with interference from visual material of either similar or quite dissimilar patterns to that of memoranda. The results provided by two co-variance analyses are: (i) the comparison of the hemisphere-damaged groups with controls show a significant memory decay of both right groups only when there was perceptual interference from similar patterns; (ii) the comparisons between hemisphere-damaged groups fail to elicit any significant difference in the three memory conditions. There appears to be no specific neocortical area involved in the first steps of memory processing of spatial informations and the interference engendered by interpolated perceptual activity is material-specific.

Adult↗
PubMed1977

Decision in ambiguity: hemispheric dominance or interaction?

Fifty-eight subjects were shown tachistoscopically grey rectangles, at the centre of the field of vision. The rectangles extended equally to the left and right of the visual fixation point, and were presented under four background conditions: all white, all black, white in the left half of the field and black in the right half, black in the left and white in the right half. "Chimerical" backgrounds were assumed to create an interhemispheric ambiguity in the perception of the greyness of the stimuli as a consequence of opposed brightness contrasts. The reported birghtness was therefore expected to reflect a hemispheric dominance or an interhemispheric averaging of information. The results of the experiment supported the second hypothesis.

Discrimination, Psychological↗
PubMed1976

Cerebral dominance and visual similarity judgements.

Visual similarity judgements among rectangles varying in form and area were investigated in control subjects and in patients with lesions confined to either cerebral hemisphere. While an overweighing of form with respect to area was found in both control subjects and right brain-damaged, left brain-damaged patients equally weighted the two relevant dimensions. Beyond revealing differential processing rules related to the side of the injury in the brain, the findings lend themselves to some speculation about cerebral dominance.

Brain Damage, Chronic↗
PubMed1976

Halving a horizontal segment: a study on hemisphere-damaged patients with cerebral focal lesions.

The aim of this study was to point out a hemisphere asymmetry in focal brain-damaged patients and a hand asymmetry in normals on halving binocularly a horizontal line. 50 left hemisphere and 53 right hemisphere patients (both subdivided by presence/absence of visual field defect) and 50 controls (divided by the hand they used to carry out the task) were employed. 4 differently long segments made up the test material and the error scores with respect to the geometric midpoint were worked out by means of parametric statistical procedures. It turned out that: (i) healthy subjects committed a mean leftward displacement, regardless of the hand they used. All the same, only the halving error committed by the right hand is significant keeping as reference the geometric midpoint of the segment; (ii) left and right hemisphere-damaged patients committed halving errors, that are opposite in direction, leftward for the former and rightward for the latter; (iii) the behaviour of right patients with visual field defects is the only to be significantly different from that of the corresponding controls. Our findings point to prevailing importance of the right hemisphere mainly of its posterior areas, in the halving task.

Brain Damage, Chronic↗