Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Feb 2010
Comparative StudyExecutive dysfunction in traumatic brain injury: the effects of injury severity and effort on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.
This study examined the persistent effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) performance. Since poor effort can contaminate results in populations with incentive to perform poorly, performance validity was explicitly assessed and controlled for using multiple well-validated cognitive malingering indicators. Participants were 109 patients with mild TBI and 67 patients with moderate-to-severe TBI seen for neuropsychological evaluation at least one year post injury. ⋯ Results suggested a dose-response effect of TBI severity on WCST performance in patients providing good effort; the mild TBI group did not differ from controls while increased levels of impairment were observed in the moderate-to-severe TBI group. Effort during testing had a larger impact on WCST performance than mild or moderate-to-severe TBI. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
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This study investigated the notion that children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) show a reduced capacity of internally simulating movements of their own body or motor imagery. Using a mental rotation paradigm the contribution of hand posture to laterality/mirror judgments of bodily and alphanumeric stimuli was studied in 13 children with DCD and 13 matched typically developing (TD) children. Children were asked to judge whether the stimulus on display, rotated over -90 degrees , -30 degrees , +30 degrees , or +90 degrees , was a right or left hand or a canonical or mirror-reversed letter. ⋯ Moreover, the results also indicate a contribution of hand posture to the laterality judgments of hands, with longer RTs when the posture of the participants' hands was opposite to the posture of the hands on display. Importantly, these effects that suggest an imagery strategy engaging motor processes were present in both groups. Apparently, the children with DCD of the present study did rely on motor imagery to solve the mental rotation task; however, their judgments seem to be compromised by a less well-defined internal model.
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Jul 2009
Subcortical neglect is not always a transient phenomenon: evidence from a 1-year follow-up study.
Compared to cortical lesions, spatial neglect following subcortical stroke is most frequently seen as a mild and transient phenomenon. Since this assumption is based on only few observations, we reexamined the prognosis and severity of spatial neglect in patients with circumscribed right-sided basal ganglia or thalamic lesions in the acute and in the chronic phase of the stroke. ⋯ The severity was reduced to about one third. The results argue against the view that spatial neglect following subcortical lesions typically has a favorable prognosis.
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J Clin Exp Neuropsychol · Apr 2009
The contribution of anterior and posterior regions of the right hemisphere to the recognition of emotional faces.
To investigate the contribution of posterior and anterior parts of the right hemisphere (RH) to emotional facial recognition, we studied 11 participants with anterior strokes of the right hemisphere (ASRH), 16 patients with posterior strokes of the right hemisphere (PSRH), and 31 normal controls. All individuals were right-handed and nondemented. The ability to recognize emotional facial expressions was assessed by using Ekman and Friesen's (1976) Pictures of Facial Affect. ⋯ However, patients with PSRH were able to identify facial expressions better than participants with ASRH. In comparison to participants sustaining PSRH, patients with ASRH were particularly impaired on recognizing faces of negative valence. Thus, our results suggest that anterior parts of the RH seem to play an important role in the recognition of emotional facial expressions.
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Change blindness (CB), the inability to detect changes in visual scenes, may increase with age and early Alzheimer's disease (AD). To test this hypothesis, participants were asked to localize changes in natural scenes. Dependent measures were response time (RT), hit rate, false positives (FP), and true sensitivity (d'). ⋯ CB correlated with impaired attention, working memory, and executive function. Advanced age and AD were associated with increased CB, perhaps due to declining memory and attention. CB could affect real-world tasks, like automobile driving.