Biomedical subjects

J Y Cappelletti

Publications and source records attributed to J Y Cappelletti.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2000

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↗

PubMed1998

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↗

PubMed1998

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↗

PubMed1997

Naming deficit for non-living items: neuropsychological and PET study.

We report a patient with progressive left hemisphere atrophy who presented a lexical retrieval deficit more pronounced in naming non-living items than in naming living items. Word frequency and familiarity strongly influenced the performance, but the dissociation persisted when the items were controlled for these factors. In addition, the prevalent deficit for non-living items in respect to living items could be confirmed in tasks where other patients presented the opposite pattern. A PET study showed a significant hypometabolism in the left hemisphere regions suggesting that, at variance with living deficit which is observed in patients with bilateral lesions, non-living deficit is produced by unilateral left hemispheric lesions. This patient confirms that living and non-living categories may dissociate and that distinct neural systems subsume their knowledge.

Aged↗