Biomedical subjects

E Vakil

Publications and source records attributed to E Vakil.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMed1994

A supplementary measure in the Rey AVLT for assessing incidental learning of temporal order.

Temporal order judgment is considered an important aspect of memory, both clinically and theoretically. Theories treat temporal order variously as an example of automatic process, contextual information, or source memory. However, despite its significance, temporal order is not well represented in standard memory tests or batteries. The well-known Rey AVLT (Auditory-Verbal Learning Test) was judged suitable for incorporation of a temporal order measure because it already includes several measures of learning and memory. The measure was administered to 190 healthy subjects divided into four age groups, who then were given list A in random order and asked to rewrite the words in their original order. Memory for temporal order was found to be sensitive to age and gender. Although temporal order judgment was part of incidental learning, scoring was significantly higher than could be attributed to chance. The correlation pattern between temporal order and other Rey AVLT scores suggests that temporal order is related to retention rather than to acquisition.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Clinical neuropsychology and brain injury rehabilitation in Israel: a twenty-year perspective.

The development of the field of neuropsychology in Israel is primarily the result of the development of rehabilitation services for traumatic brain-injured patients. The responsibility to care for and help disabled veterans has always been an important motivation for the establishment of rehabilitation services. Israel is probably one of the first countries in the world to develop community-based services specifically designed to address the needs of young patients with severe traumatic brain injury. The fairly extensive therapeutic and community services available today for both military and civilian brain-injured persons in Israel ae the result of initiatives and funding by the Israel Ministry of Defense's Department of Rehabilitation. There are two principles that characterize most of the programs in Israel: (1) multidimensional remedial intervention and (2) life-time commitment to provide support. The accessibility of patients in a small country enables professionals to conduct follow-up studies in order to evaluate the long-term effects of brain injury. Current developments in neuropsychology are in three directions. First, formal training programs in neuropsychology are being set up. Second, the involvement of neuropsychologists is being extended beyond the treatment of young patients suffering from traumatic brain injury to include the treatment of different brain pathologies in children and the elderly. Third, sophisticated neuroimaging techniques are being applied to studies in cognitive neuropsychology.

Brain Injuries↗

PubMed1994

Head-injured patients and control group: implicit versus explicit measures of frequency of occurrence.

This study was conducted in order to investigate the possibility that effortful processes are involved in the retrieval stage of the putative automatic task-frequency judgment. Head-injured (HI) and control groups were tested on a frequency of occurrence task under explicit-intentional retrieval (i.e., frequency estimation) and implicit-unintentional retrieval (i.e., word-stem priming) conditions. Subjects were presented with a list of nouns that appeared once, three times, and six times. Following presentation, subjects were first given a priming task, then a recall task, and finally a frequency judgment task. Although the control group performed better than the HI group on recall and frequency judgment tasks, the groups did not differ on the priming task. The results are discussed in terms of the relationship between effortful and automatic memory processes.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1993

Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test: structure analysis.

One of the major advantages of the Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) is its multiple measures of learning and memory. This study evaluated empirically whether the different scores are, in fact, not merely different expressions of a single factor, but, rather, measures of different memory domains. The Rey AVLT was administered to 146 normal subjects. Factor analyses produced one, two, or three factors depending on the combination of scores included in the analysis and on the criteria used to determine the number of factors. The basic factors identified were acquisition and retention. The latter can be subdivided further into storage and retrieval, thus yielding a total of three factors.

Adult↗

PubMed1992

Differential effect of right and left hemispheric lesions on two memory tasks: free recall of items and recall of spatial location.

The effect of lateralized cerebral damage on free recall of items and recall of spatial location, under intentional and incidental learning conditions, was investigated. Eleven right brain-damaged (RBD) patients, 10 left brain-damaged (LBD) patients, 14 young and 11 elderly normal controls, participated in this study. The overall performance of the control groups was better than that of the patient groups. For all groups, free recall was better under intentional than under incidental learning condition. On recall of spatial location the learning condition had a differential effect on the groups. The RBD group performed better than the LBD group under intentional learning condition, while the reverse was found under incidental learning condition. The young-control group showed an advantage over the elderly-control group under intentional but not under incidental learning condition. The results are discussed in regard to different approaches to the distinction between automatic and effortful memory processes and their lateralization in the cerebral hemispheres.

Adult↗

PubMed1992

Relative importance of informational units and their role in long-term recall by closed-head-injured patients and control groups.

The purpose of this study was to apply qualitative analysis to the information recalled by control Ss and closed-head-injured (CHI) patients. The Logical Memory subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale (Wechsler, 1945) was administered to 40 CHI and 40 control Ss. Recall was tested immediately after administration, 40 min later, and 24 hr later. The analysis took into account the importance of recalled information as determined by a prior rating according to 3 levels of importance. Results suggest that CHI patients have difficulty selectively retrieving the most important information after a long delay.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1992

Total amount learned versus learning rate of verbal and nonverbal information, in differentiating left-from right-brain injured patients.

Twenty Left-Brain Damaged (LBD), 20 Right-Brain Damaged (RBD), and 20 control subjects were compared on three different learning tasks: (a) verbal, the Paired Associate Learning subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale; (b) figural, the Gollin Incomplete Figures task, which can be easily verbalized, and (c) spatial, the Stylus Maze. When learning ability was measured, by assessing the total amount learned (sum of items learned in all trials), the results showed that, on all three tasks, the control group's performance significantly surpassed that of the patient groups. The RBD group performed better than the LBD group on the verbal learning task, while LBD subjects performed better than their RBD counterparts on the spatial learning task. No significant difference between the two patient groups was detected on the figural task, suggesting that a task using visually and verbally codable stimuli is not useful in differentiating between LBD and RBD groups. When the learning rate was measured, similar results were obtained in the verbal and figural task. However, in the spatial task, the learning rates of the three groups did not significantly differ, probably because the specific task used required procedural learning, which is normally preserved in amnesics.

Journal Article↗

PubMed1991

Differential effect of right and left hemispheric lesions on two memory tasks: free recall and frequency judgement.

We investigated the relationship between lateralized cerebral damage and two memory tasks; free recall and frequency judgement. Free recall is considered to be processed effortfully while frequency judgement is considered to be processed automatically (Hasher and Zacks). Nine right brain-damaged patients (RBD), nine left brain-damaged patients (LBD) and nine control subjects participated in this study. It was hypothesized that RBD would show an advantage over LBD on the free-recall task, whereas LBD would show an advantage over RBD on the frequency-judgement task. In accordance with our hypothesis, free-recall was more impaired in LBD than in RBD. In the frequency-judgement task, an effect of laterality of lesion was found in high (4-6) and low (0-1) frequencies, but not in the medium (2-3) frequencies. The anticipated LBD advantage was shown in judgement of the high frequencies, but unexpectedly RBD performed better than LBD in low frequencies. The results are discussed in terms of the relationship between effortful and automatic memory processes and cerebral lateralization.

Aged↗

PubMed1991

Automatic temporal order judgment: the effect of intentionality of retrieval on closed-head-injured patients.

Closed-head-injured (CHI) and control groups were tested on a temporal order task under intentional and incidental retrieval conditions. Subjects were given five presentations of a list of nouns. In the incidental retrieval condition, subjects were told that they were to remember the words but that the order was not important. In the intentional retrieval condition, subjects were given the words in an order different from that in which they were originally presented and were asked to reorder the words to match the original order. For both conditions we compared the order in which words were recalled to the order in which they were originally presented. The results suggest that temporal order memory had more effortful characteristics in the intentional than in the incidental retrieval condition. The two groups did not differ significantly in the incidental retrieval condition. However, while the control group showed a significant improvement in the intentional retrieval condition. CHI groups performance did not significantly change. This study highlights two major points: (1) intentionality at the retrieval stage determines the effortfulness with which information is processed; (2) the more automatic the tasks, the better it is preserved following closed-head injury.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1988

Evaluating evidence for automaticity in frequency of occurrence judgments: a bias for bias?

Frequency of occurrence judgments were evaluated in young adults recovering from closed-head injuries, normal elderly, and young adult controls. Impaired performance was observed in both head-injured and elderly subjects, a result contrary to Hasher and Zacks' 1979 hypothesis that this information accumulates in memory via automatic processes which are unaffected by age, but supporting their conjecture that damage to the central nervous system would be sufficient to interfere with this function. The head-injured subject's performance on the frequency judgment task was correlated with effortful memory capacity as measured by several widely used memory tests. Whether the obtained group differences reflect differences in memory capacity or response criteria effects is discussed, and several methods of analyzing the data are compared.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Interpretation of facial expressions of affect in children with learning disabilities with verbal or nonverbal deficits.

The ability to identify facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise,fear, and disgust was studied in 48 nondisabled children and 76 children with learning disabilities aged 9 through 12. On the basis of their performance on the Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test and the Benton Visual Retention Test, the LD group was divided into three subgroups: those with verbal deficits (VD), nonverbal deficits (NVD), and both verbal and nonverbal (BD) deficits. The measure of ability to interpret facial expressions of affect was a shortened version of Ekman and Friesen's Pictures of Facial Affect. Overall, the nondisabled group had better interpretive ability than the three learning disabled groups and the VD group had better ability than the NVD and BD groups. Although the identification level of the nondisabled group differed from that of the VD group only for surprise, it was superior to that of the NVD and BD groups for four of the six emotions. Happiness was the easiest to identify, and the remaining emotions in ascending order of difficulty were anger, surprise, sadness, fear, and disgust. Older subjects did better than younger ones only for fear and disgust, and boys and girls did not differ in interpretive ability. These findings are discussed in terms of the need to take note of the heterogeneity of the learning disabled population and the particular vulnerability to social imperception of children with nonverbal deficits.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Behavioural psychotherapy of the frontal-lobe-injured patient in an outpatient setting.

We present two cases of outpatient behavioural psychotherapy of frontal-lobe brain-injured adults. Unlike inpatient treatment of severely frontal-injured patients in which the hospital setting acts on the patient to modify behaviour, outpatient treatment teaches the self-motivated individual to use the structure and directiveness of behavioural psychotherapy to overcome his or her neuropsychological deficits. The literature describes two types of frontal syndromes: disinhibition and adynamia. Treatment of both types of syndromes is illustrated using case presentations. The therapeutic interventions for both syndromes are designed to exaggerate the link between stimulus and response to counter impaired processing of feedback. A six-stage behavioural psychotherapy model of the frontal-injured patient is outlined.

Activities of Daily Living↗