Abstract
Constructional apraxia is a neuropsychological and neurological impairment in activities such as building, assembling, and drawing. In this study data is presented on the performance of left and right hemisphere single focal stroke lesion participants on drawing tasks of houses, trees, and persons. Forty-one participants completed a comprehensive neuropsychological battery including the house-tree-person drawing task. The drawings were then rated as exhibiting signs of neurological impairment or non-impairment by three evaluators without knowledge of the medical condition of the patient. There was 72% agreement between the three evaluators of the 123 drawings. Both an analysis of variance and case series analysis was used to examine the data. Patterns of concordance with a previously outlined detailed neuropsychological model of constructional apraxia were found and the implications of the results are analyzed in the context of the current neuropsychological literature.
Highlights
Human drawings of real-life animal, plant and partial human figures is an ancient ability or pursuit of Paleolithic man and woman
It is important to mention that the Threshold Rating System which was shown to be near-equivalent to the Unanimous Rating System for all of the three sets of drawings of cases 1A-7A
The precise relationship between constructional apraxia (CA) associated with person drawings and an inability to point to body parts on command in autotopagnosia is beyond the scope of this study
Summary
Human drawings of real-life animal, plant and partial human figures is an ancient ability or pursuit of Paleolithic man and woman. One of the best examples of this is the Chauvet caves of southern France dating to 32,000 years old of the Aurignacian period. This cave which was discovered in 1994 is a UNESCO world heritage site. Despite the importance of visual artistic abilities, little is known about the neural correlates of them and much work is yet to be done to understand the intrinsic nature of aesthetic appreciation for art [2]. What little research on these drawing abilities currently exists suggests that these neural networks are widespread and distributed across the brain, complex and consisting of multiple modules working in a coordinated manner
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