Task-specificity and similarities in processing numbers and words: available data and future directions.
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Brain↗
Biomedical subjects
G Denes
Publications and source records attributed to G Denes.
A category-specific deficit of spatial representation: the case of autotopagnosia.
Following a vascular lesion in the parietal cortex of the language dominant hemisphere (right in one case), two patients showed a striking dissociation between spared naming, recognition and use of their body parts and an inability in localising on verbal command the same body parts on themselves and on a mannequin (Autotopagnosia, AT). The patients were submitted to a modified version of Reed and Farah Test (1995), a test that taps the ability to encode changes of body position as opposed to changes of position of objects. Their performance differed from normal controls, showing a specific deficit in encoding body position. It is suggested that AT could be the consequence of a lesion in a specific neural circuit, located in the language dominant hemisphere, whose function is to encode the body position for both oneself and others.
Aged↗
Titanium-niobium, a new finishing wire alloy.
The mechanical properties of the newly introduced titanium-niobium finishing wires were investigated. Both in bending and torsional loading mode, the stiffness, yield point, post-yield behavior, and springback of titanium-niobium wires were experimentally determined and compared to those of equally sized stainless steel wires. The experimentally obtained values were also validated with theoretical values from engineering formulas of cantilever deformations. The ratios for these parameters for the two materials proved to be different in bending and torsion. The stiffness of titanium-niobium in bending is roughly half of that of stainless steel, whereas in torsion it is roughly one-third. These characteristics enable the clinician to use titanium-niobium for creative bends without the excessive force levels of steel wires. The springback of titanium-niobium in bending is 14% lower than that of steel, whereas in torsion it is about the same or even slightly higher than that of steel, thus making it possible to utilize the wire for even major third-order corrections. Finally, the weldability of titanium-niobium wires was found to be good, so it is possible to weld wires of different dimensions together for the generation of differentiated force systems.
Journal Article↗
The breakdown of calculation procedures in Alzheimer's disease.
The study investigates calculation abilities in 12 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and compares them to calculation abilities of healthy control subjects (NC) and patients with focal left hemisphere lesions (LHL). AD patients scored significantly lower than NC in all calculation tasks and lower than LHL patients in the execution of complex written calculation, but not in the retrieval of arithmetic facts. In the AD group a subject-by-subject error analysis on the complex written calculation showed a low consistency and a high variability of error types. It is suggested that AD patients' difficulties in complex calculation arise from a monitoring deficit and not from incomplete or distorted calculation algorithms. Overall, deficits in monitoring calculation procedures may be an early and common symptom of AD.
Alzheimer Disease↗
Numerical skills and aphasia.
The aim of this study was to investigate numerical difficulties in 50 patients with left hemispheric lesions. Aphasic patients were grouped according to their type of aphasia diagnosed by the Aachener Aphasia Test. The overall error rate in various transcoding and calculation tasks was clearly correlated with the severity of the language deficit, global aphasics being the most impaired patients. Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics scored similarly at the quantitative level, and amnesic aphasics were less impaired. Interestingly, qualitative analysis of the errors indicated that each group presented with specific difficulties, partially reflecting the nature of the language problems. In simple calculation, multiplication was found to be the most impaired operation, in particular in Broca's aphasics. This result supports the hypothesis that the retrieval of multiplication facts is preferentially mediated by verbal processing. Calculation procedures were mainly impaired in Wernicke's and global aphasics.
Adult↗
Limb-kinetic apraxia.
Five cases of limb-kinetic apraxia following primary degenerative cerebral pathology are reported. Apraxia appeared as the main symptom and was not concomitant to aphasia or to widespread cognitive impairments. Apraxia was not a consequence of elementary motor or sensory deficits, lack of coordination, or the result of the presence of rigid-akinetic symptoms. The apraxia was usually unilateral, being present in both routine activities and testing sessions and consisting of the coarse, unilateral, awkward execution of correctly planned movements. Conceptual knowledge of the movements and their ideational plan was spared. The characteristics of apraxia fit the definition of limb-kinetic apraxia originally proposed by Liepmann. The pertinent literature is reviewed.
Aged↗
G.B. Vico, precursor of cognitive neuropsychology? The first reported case of noun-verb dissociation following brain damage.
The first case of selective impairment in retrieving verbs in comparison to nouns, following brain damage, was reported in 1744 by the Neapolitan philosopher G. B. Vico. He considered such observation experimental evidence of the correctness of his theory on mental organization of language, thus anticipating the methods of cognitive neuropsychology.
Aphasia↗
Writing arabic numerals in an agraphic patient.
We report on the writing of Arabic numerals in a patient whose alphabetical script was restricted to graphemic jargon (Schonauer & Denes, 1994). The analysis of writing errors in Arabic script over three testing sessions (4, 10, and 13 months after stroke) confirmed the separate processing of syntactic and lexical information in number production proposed by current models. The changing error pattern over time reflected some difficulties observed in developmental studies on the acquisition of Arabic numeral writing. Errors were mostly of the syntactic type and (at a certain stage) were based on the verbal form of the numerals. As reported in neuropsychological (Noel & Seron, 1995) and developmental (Power & Dal Martello, 1990; Seron & Fayol, 1994) studies, sum relations were more difficult to transcode than product relations within complex numerals.
Agraphia↗
Temporal gradient in confabulation.
We report on a patient, PL, who developed an amnesic confabulatory syndrome following heart arrest. PL's confabulation occurred both in episodic and semantic memory tasks. In a task in which she was asked to identify photographs of people and events highly familiar to her, a temporal gradient on her performance emerged. Confabulation was massive for the recognition of photographs from the eighties and decreased consistently for the recognition of photographs representing people and events from earlier decades. Correct responses, in contrast, were distributed according to an opposite pattern. Correct recognition was very high for photographs from the fifties but consistently decreased for photographs from the following decades. These results are discussed in terms of the co-occurrence and interaction of preserved awareness of the personal past and impaired ability to access less stable memories. These results also suggest that memories are not stored randomly but according to a temporal criterion that presumably reflects the relative strength and stability of stored episodic memories.
Amnesia↗
Multiple-domain dissociation between impaired visual perception and preserved mental imagery in a patient with bilateral extrastriate lesions.
A brain-damaged patient is described whose pattern of performance provides insight into both the functional mechanisms and the neural structures involved in visual mental imagery. The patient became severely agnosic, alexic, achromatopsic and prosopagnosic following bilateral brain lesions in the temporo-occipital cortex. However, her mental imagery for the same visual entities that she could not perceive was perfectly preserved. This clear-cut dissociation held across all the major domains of high-level vision: object recognition, reading, colour and face processing. Our findings, together with other reports on domain-specific dissociations and functional brain imaging studies, provide evidence to support the view that visual perception and visual mental imagery are subserved by independent functional mechanisms, which do not share the same cortical implementation. In particular, our results suggest that mental imagery abilities need not be mediated by early visual cortices.
Aged↗
Preserved imagery for colours in a patient with cerebral achromatopsia.
We report the case of a patient who, after sequential bilateral strokes in the occipital regions sparing the primary visual cortex, developed a severe deficit of colour perception. At variance with other reports of acquired achromatopsic patients, she showed a perfectly vivid visual imagery for colours. These findings, together with similar data in domains other than colour processing, challenge the theories which posit that the same cognitive processes are involved in both the perception and the retrieval from memory of a given stimulus.
Aged↗
Remembering and knowing the past: a case study of isolated retrograde amnesia.
We describe a patient, RM, who suddenly became amnesic for premorbid autobiographic events in the absence of any known precipitating event. Learning abilities as well as semantic knowledge were normal. Knowledge of famous facts and persons was good, although not perfect. Whether RM suffered from organic or psychogenic isolated retrograde amnesia (IRA) could not be established on the basis of available clinical and neuropsychological elements. Regardless of its aetiology, RM's case respects the boundaries between semantic and episodic memory and so gives further support to the distinction between these two memory systems.
Adolescent↗
Semantic and episodic memory in aphasia.
Within the framework of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, it has been argued that these two memory Systems are organised in a hierarchical way. The hierarchical hypothesis assumes that episodic memory is a specific subsystem of semantic memory and therefore implies that episodic memory cannot exist without semantic memory. If this hypothesis is correct, it should be expected that (episodic) yes/no recognition performance would improve in patients with preserved semantic memory, following semantic encoding. In the present study we investigated the influence of semantic encoding on recognition memory performance in a population of 28 aphasic patients (AA) and 14 normal controls (NC). Experiment 1 considered recognition memory for semantically unrelated items, whereas Experiments 2 and 3 assessed recognition memory for semantically related items. In Experiment 3, but not in Experiment 2, subjects were explicitly instructed to make a semantic association between the items. AA were impaired, compared to NC, only on the recognition memory performance of Experiment 1. The ability to make a semantic association between two items was significantly and positively correlated to the ability to recognise, in a subsequent test, those same items. A further analysis showed that patients who were impaired on the semantic association task did significantly worse on the recognition task of Experiment 3 than NC and than patients who were unimpaired on the semantic association task. These findings are discussed in the context of memory deficits in aphasia and interpreted as giving support to the view that episodic memory for an item is affected by the level of semantic awareness of that same item.
Aphasia↗
The representation of arithmetical facts: evidence from two rehabilitation studies.
We report the improvement following rehabilitation of two patients with a selective deficit on multiplication facts. The remediation experiments were conducted in specific designs to test a series of hypotheses about both the process of reacquisition and organisation of arithmetical facts in memory. The results show a significant and stable recovery and the pattern of reacquisition reflects the different strategy used by the patients to relearn the multiplication facts. Quantitative and qualitative changes in error patterns in the course of remediation reveal the underlying (re)organization of the memory network representing multiplication facts.
Adult↗
Graphemic jargon: a case report.
We report on a patient with left hemispheric thromboembolic stroke whose writing performance on single word dictation following recovery from an aphasic syndrome remained severely impaired but fluent. Having only very fragmentary command of the target's written spelling she produced neologistic nonwords which were approximately the same length and contained, in addition to perseverative intrusions and unidentifiable errors multiple insertions, deletions, transpositions, and substitutions but only few unpronounceable combinations. The patient was tested 4 and 10 months postonset, before and after having attended a rehabilitation program for dysgraphia. Comparing pre- and post-rehabilitation error corpora we found, besides a slight improvement of her severe dysgraphia, a highly significant predilection of in-class substitutions regarding the consonant/vowel status of misspelled graphemes. The second error corpus revealed some influence of different consonant/vowel patterns among the targets on the emergence of spelling errors. We discuss the hypothesis of an influence of nonlexical "graphotactic" features on the spelling process as has been revealed by other cases of acquired dysgraphia published in recent years.
Agraphia↗
Anomia for people's names.
The case of an anomia for people's names is reported. The study of this dissociation helps to clarify the difference in processing between proper and common names. Associated deficits in this and previously described cases provide support for the idea that an inability to retrieve arbitrary relations is the basis of the naming difficulty. This would confirm the role of proper names as purely referring expressions.
Adult↗
[Physiology, psychology and pathology of writing and spelling--an overview].
Writing and spelling are conceived as concerted actions comprising cognitive planning, motor action and an expressive content. In literate societies the individual use of alphabetic systems is acquired immediately after speech as a "cultural technique". As such these systems demand specific cognitive and motor skills which have been analysed primarily on the basis of neurological and psychiatric syndromes. We distinguish primary developmental disturbances and secondarily acquired disturbances of writing and spelling, categorizing the latter into four essential disturbance areas: linguistic command, motor execution, automatism control and dynamic tonus regulation. The clinical significance of writing and spelling is not confined to its possible disturbances. In pathologically induced restrictions of cognitive functions or of social skills the fact is rather that the written language frequently contributes to the development of individual coping strategies. From the psychodynamic aspect, written communication is characterized principally by its proximity-regulating function.
Handwriting↗
Concepts and facts in calculation.
A patient is described who is affected by an inability to recall and use 'arithmetical facts' of one-digit multiplications and divisions. This loss contrasts with the preservation of a wide set of complex notions that the patient exploits in order to overcome his deficit and get the right result. This observation helps in isolating and describing an important component of arithmetical long-term memory that is not overlearnt and the functioning of which is not automatic or mechanistic. An account of such a component is lacking in models of arithmetic currently referred to in cognitive neuropsychology. In a remediation study, performed over several weeks, the effect of training was selective for each single arithmetical fact: not even skills with multiplication complements (e.g. 6 x 3, 3 x 6) fully benefited from the rehabilitation of a specific fact. This suggests that the storage format of each fact is independent from that of other facts.
Cerebrovascular Disorders↗