Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to H Spinnler.
Ideomotor apraxia was checked in a carefully selected group of patients with Alzheimer's dementia, all in the mild stage of the disease. It was shown that ideomotor apraxia is not an early neuropsychological feature. When compared with other cognitive measures, the speed of deterioration of ideomotor apraxia appears to be particularly slow.
A non-verbal problem solving task, viz. a simplified version of Shallice's London Towers Test, was given to 131 normal subjects to obtain normative data relating to age, education and sex. The test was built up in its easiest possible feature in order to be administrable also to demented patients, therefore possibly becoming part of the neuropsychological diagnostic procedures of the demential syndromes. Although this version of the test proved to be very easy and therefore likely to yield a statistically treatable wide distribution of scores in demented patients, the age-related decline of performance in normals was apparent. Education and sex showed no significant influence on the test-performance. With correction of the raw scores for age and with knowledge of the distribution of scores in the normal population, this test is now ready to assess the normality of the scores of a new subject according to his age, giving information on this otherwise still uncovered sector of cognitive abilities.
In this study we investigated whether there are predictors for recovery from ideomotor apraxia (IMA) in patients with focal left hemisphere vascular lesions. Recovery was followed in 26 patients, first examined between 15 and 30 days postonset. They were apraxic at the first examination and had a second (and in some cases, a third) neuropsychological assessment after some months. Six patients with bilateral lesions were also studied to help to define the role of the right hemisphere in recovery from IMA. Other neuropsychological variables (Token Test, Progressive Matrices and Oral Apraxia scores) and site and size of the lesion were also determined. The main results are that improvement from IMA is related to the site of the lesion (anterior lesions faring better); the evolution of IMA is related more to the evolution of oral apraxia than to the evolution of other neuropsychological variables; and the presence of a second lesion in the right hemisphere did not have the negative influence on recovery that might have been expected.
This study investigated whether there are predictors for initial severity of ideomotor apraxia (IMA) in focal left-hemisphere vascular patients. One hundred and twenty-nine subjects were examined between 15 and 30 days post-onset. Twenty-five patients with bilateral lesions were also studied in order to delineate the role of the right hemisphere. Other neuropsychological variables (i.e., token test, progressive matrices and oral apraxia scores) and size of the lesion were included in the experimental design. The main results were that a) token test, progressive matrices, oral apraxia scores, and lesion size correlate significantly with IMA, and b) that the presence of a second lesion in the right hemisphere is not found to have any significant effect on initial severity of IMA.
A series of 224 patients with organic mental deterioration, including 129 patients with presumptive Alzheimer dementia, is described chiefly from the neuropsychological standpoint. Several methodological problems arising from research on dementia are discussed.
Twenty-five non-demented patients with mild, idiopathic, Parkinson's disease were compared with 25 age and education matched normal controls on a visuo-spatial performance task, whose characteristics were directional forecast, with minimal motor requirement and a maximal spatial load. No statistical support was found for the existence of spatial impairment in these patients.
A patient is described who, following an episode of acute brain hypoxia, showed the selective neuropsychological syndrome of Global Amnesia, including preserved unconscious procedural learning ability, associated with the clinical feature of 'indifférence amnésique'. A 12-month follow-up neuropsychological study failed to show any evolution of the memory and emotional disorders, as in other amnesics with eventual widespread brain damage.
Discrimination between senile dementia Alzheimer type (SDAT) patients (N = 30) and Normal Controls (N = 60) by means of a 6-test set was assessed. Performances on Word Fluency (FL), Memory for Prose (PM) and Finger Agnosia (FA) nearly exhaust the discriminant power of the whole battery, including Constructional Apraxia (CA), Token Test (TT) and Weigl's Sorting Test (WT). The battery, however, leaves some facets of the difference between SDAT patients and Controls unexplored, misclassifying almost 20% of the SDAT patients and 10% of the Controls. We emphasize the role of discriminant analysis in the evaluation of any neuropsychological battery of tests which has to be used for diagnostic purposes.
It is known that focal damage of the left hemisphere causes poor performances in a number of tasks devoid of overt verbal connotation, often referred to as "non-verbal intelligence", "association" or "abstract attitude" tasks. However, it is not clear whether the existence of a unitary basic functional defect to account for the faulty performances outlined above can be supposed. In this investigation we have compared the behaviour of left-hemisphere damaged patients grouped according to aphasia type and have studied the extent to which two different, widely used tests of this supposed "non-verbal basic ability" (i.e. the Weigl Sorting Test and the Raven Progressive Matrices) overlap in their predictive power of the performance of a non-verbal association task, i.e. the Colour-Figure Matching Test. Notwithstanding the identical level of performance in the three tests between groups having different aphasia types, a clear-cut dissociation was found between Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics; in the former group the Colour-Figure Matching Test was highly correlated only with Weigl Sorting Test and in the latter only with Progressive Matrices. The conclusions are that in this case the breakdown of non-verbal basic resources does not coincide in patients with different types of aphasia, and the hypothesis of the existence of a unitary basic defect caused by left hemisphere damage is not in line with our findings.
The aim of the study was to sort out whether in normal subjects hemispheric asymmetries in memory encoding arise at the input or at the recognition stage of verbal (diagrams of letters) and spatial patterns (diagrams of stars) in a 3 X 3 virtual matrix. Target and probe stimuli were tachistoscopically presented to the same or the opposite hemisphere. Letters, but not stars, were better recognized in a crossed condition in which targets were flashed to the right and probes to the left hemisphere. The finding suggests that the right hemisphere (but not the left) is capable of adding specific, possibly mnestic, resources to the first stage of letter processing.
Three experiments were performed in normal subjects to find out whether interhemispheric functional asymmetries in oral recall of meaningless trigrams of consonants, laterally presented through a tachistoscope, were affected by the subsequent presentation and the immediate recall of visual (verbal and geometrical) vs auditory information. It was shown that the visual presentation of after-target information brought about a right hemisphere disadvantage, which did not occur when the additional information was presented auditorily. The results are consistent with the view that, as to visually presented letters, the right hemisphere processing systems run along a physical code.
The aims of the research were to test (i) whether moderate chronic alcoholics (A/pts) perform worse than non teetotaler controls (C/pts) either on memory or on intelligence tasks or on both, and (ii) whether there was a significant difference between verbal and spatial memory scores pointing to the claimed prevailing right hemisphere sensitivity to alcohol abuse. Great care was taken in selecting C/pts not to exaggerate by sample biasing the psychological effects of alcoholism. Intelligence was tested by means of verbal and performance Wechsler-Bellevue IQ and Raven PM47; memory was tested by means of serial immediate memory span and learning by means of verbal and spatial devices. The results support the conclusion that chronic wine alcoholism in a band of drinkers with lowish educational background and very set drinking habits impairs memory and intelligence without any significant difference. Moreover there is no evidence of a prevalent right hemisphere sensitivity to chronic alcohol addiction.
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The case of a left-hemisphere damaged patient with an impairment of auditory verbal memory span is described. The neuropsychological study showed a dissociation between short-term and long-term auditory verbal memory, which may be attributed to a selective defect of auditory verbal short-term memory. Since a tachistoscopic study displayed a short-term memory superiority of the left hemisphere, it can be argued that the performance for visual verbal stimuli may still be held by the left hemisphere, albeit computerized tomography showed a left-hemisphere lesion involving the whole language area.
Is each hemisphere capable of disentangling a specific kind of information from a complex 3-target set of stimuli in an expectancy-free delayed recognition experiment on normals? A tachistoscopical study set out to answer this question. It provided evidence for a double dissociation between the hemisphere of input of complex stimuli (comprising both spatial and verbal information) and the kind of information to be retrieved.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.