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Biomedical subjects

H Gardner

Publications and source records attributed to H Gardner.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1980

Sensitivity to emotional expressions and situations in organic patients.

While numerous lines of investigation indicate the pivotal role of the right hemisphere in the apprehension and processing of emotional information, the specific contributions of facial recognition, other visual-spatial capacities, and a general understanding of emotionally-toned situations remains to be delineated. To secure information on the contributions of these various factors, matched groups of brain-damaged patients were required in a series of tests to match with one another faces of the same individual, facial expressions, pictorial versions of emotional situations, and linguistic versions of emotional situations. While patients with left-hemisphere damage evinced special difficulty with linguistically-presented stimuli, patients with right hemisphere damage exhibited an across-the-board reduction in emotional sensitivity, one not restricted to stimuli presented in the visual modality. In addition, right hemisphere patients also displayed a selective tendency to group together emotions of an opposite polarity (positively-toned with negatively-toned emotions). These results suggest that, in addition to its general importance in a range of emotional tasks, the right hemisphere is crucial for an appreciation of the structural relations which obtain among various emotions.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Lexical semantics and memory for words in aphasia.

Aphasic and non-neurological patients were assessed on a word recognition memory task. On any one trial, some words were instances of the same superordinate category, thus presupposing a common abstract conceptual feature, and some words could be linked thematically in the sense of forming context-dependent relations. Observing the temporal order in which patients pointed to the words they recognized permitted an assessment of the extent to which they clustered their responses either in terms of superordinate categories or along thematic lines. The conceptual structures indicated by these clusters were compared with those observed in a previous task requiring judgments of word relatedness. The data suggest that verbal memory limitations in aphasia are only in part linked to constraints on the conceptual features structuring lexical knowledge; and relatedly they raise the possibility that aphasics may have a disturbance of mnemonic processing quite apart from any disruption to language.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

A note on patterns of comprehension and recovery in global aphasia.

Two tests of auditory comprehension (one probing knowledge of geographical locations, the other probing knowledge of familiar objects) were administered on two occasions to global aphasic patients. In addition to words drawn from the relevant lexical domains, nonsense words and words from inappropriate syntactic categories also were presented to the patients. The aphasic subjects attained more success rejecting nonsense words and words drawn from inappropriate syntactic categories than in comprehending the target words; in addition there was a consistent and surprising superiority in making correct localizations on a map as contrasted to localizing correctly familiar objects in a room. Similarly, patients' improvement across administrations was more pronounced in their heightened ability to reject the inappropriate terms rather than in increased capacity to make more accurate localizations of the target words. Overall, improvement was modest and virtually equivalent on the two measures of auditory comprehension.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1978

Visual agnosia in an artist.

This report describes a 73 year old left-handed male artist who presented with agnosic symptoms following an occipital cerebral vascular accident. Against a background of a memory disturbance, but otherwise essentially intact linguistic and cognitive capacities, the patient was generally unable to identify single objects on visual presentation, and displayed marked difficulty in interpreting complex objects, depicted scenes, and partially occluded figures. The patient's preserved ability to recognize geometric forms, to perceive optical illusions, and to copy designs, and objects with considerable accuracy suggested the clinical picture of visual agnosia. An examination was undertaken of the effects of this recognition disorder on the artist's capacity to draw. Despite an inability to recognize an object or scene, the patient retained various techniques (perspective, shadowing, designation of texture) which allowed him to copy the display in a veridical fashion. When displays were recognized, or when the patient was given only the name of the object and asked to draw it, he adopted a less slavish approach, characteristic of his pre-morbid artwork. While his post-morbid drawings bore a strong similarity to his earlier works, such features as insufficient differentiation of figure from ground, over-elaboration of detail, and areas of neglect revealed the debilitating effects of the recognition disorder. Moreover, an examination of the patient's strategies revealed numerous compensatory verbal and motor procedures which guided his drawing. Acknowledgments. We wish to acknowledge Dr. Prather Palmer, J.R.'s neurologist, for his cooperation and for making available his very thorough examination notes. Thanks also to Dr. Kent Stevens for providing the stereograms, and to Dr. Frank Benson and Dr. Edgar Zurif for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Aged↗