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Biomedical subjects

R T Watson

Publications and source records attributed to R T Watson.

87 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

The electroencephalogram in neglect.

The extent of electroencephalographic (EEG) abnormalities in 23 consecutive patients with unilateral neglect was compared with the extent of EEG abnormalities in 20 matched aphasic controls. In the neglect group, 22 patients showed EEG slowing that extended over the entire hemisphere. In the control group only 8 patients showed similar hemispheric slowing. This study demonstrates that patients with unilateral neglect from discrete lesions may have EEG slowing in regions of the hemisphere that are remote from the lesion. This study also provides support for the hypothesis that neglect is a unilateral arousal defect.

Animals↗

Discrimination and evocation of affectively intoned speech in patients with right parietal disease.

Patients with right parietal disease have disturbed comprehension of affective speech. Ability to discriminate affective speech (make same/different discriminations) and ability to repeat emotionally bland sentences with affective tones were tested in three groups of subjects--patients with right parietal dysfunction and neglect, conduction aphasics with left hemispheric lesions, and patients without intracranial disease. Patients with right parietal dysfunction performed significantly poorer than did aphasic controls on both a recognition and discrimination task. Patients with right parietal dysfunction also scored poorer on the evocative task than the nonaphasic controls.

Adult↗

Reaction times in Parkinson disease.

Ten hypokinetic parkinsonian patients and ten age- and sex-matched controls were tested, using reaction times with and without a warning signal. The time difference between each was used as a measure of phasic arousal. Both groups' reaction times improved with a warning signal, but there were no differences in reaction-time reduction between the parkinsonian and control groups. These results suggest either that hypokinesia in parkinsonism is not caused by an arousal defect or it is caused by a defect in the "autoevoked" arousal system.

Arousal↗

Auditory affective agnosia. Disturbed comprehension of affective speech.

Hughlings Jackson noted that, although some aphasic patients were unable to use propositional speech, affective speech appeared to be spared. The purpose of this experiment was to study patients with unilateral hemispheric disease in order to ascertain if there are hemispheric asymmetries in the comprehension of affective speech. Six subjects had right temporoparietal lesions (left unilateral neglect) and six subjects had left temporoparietal lesions (fluent aphasias). These subjects were presented with 32 tape recorded sentences. In 16 trials the patients were asked to judge the emotional mood of the speaker (happy, sad, angry, indifferent) and in 16 trials the patients were asked to judge the content. Line drawings containing facial expressions of the four emotions or line drawings corresponding with the four basic contents were displayed with each sentence and the patient responded by pointing. All 12 subjects made perfect scores on the content portion of the test. On the emotional portion the right hemispheric patients scored a mean of 4-17 and the left hemispheric group scored a mean 10-17. The difference between these means is significantly (P less than 0-01) and suggests that patients with right hemispheric dysfunction and neglect have a defect in the comprehension of affective speech.

Adult↗

Chronic rhinitis.

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Chronic Disease↗

A unilateral memory defect.

Several authors have suggested that arousal is an important component of learning. If the neglect syndrome is a unilateral defect of alerting (arousal) as recent studies have suggested, then patients with this syndrome should have a unilateral learning defect. To test these hypotheses, eight patients with unilateral neglect were given consonant trigrams randomly to either ear, and the patients were asked to identify the auditory stimuli either immediately or after an 18 second delay during which time the patients were asked to count. All eight demonstrated that the number of errors between the delay and non-delay conditions was greater on the neglected side significance >0·01), thereby supporting these hypotheses.

Agnosia↗