Brain-damaged Adults Research Articles

Book ReviewRehabilitation of the Head Injured Adult Rehabilitation of the Brain-Damaged Adult

Book ReviewRehabilitation of the Head Injured Adult Rehabilitation of the Brain-Damaged Adult

Lateralized sensorimotor asymmetries in normal, learning-disabled and brain-damaged young adults.

Left-right asymmetries in sensorimotor abilities (based on the Tactile Finger Localization, Fingertip Number Writing, Finger Tapping, Grip Strength, and Tactual Performance Tests of the Halstead-Reitan Battery) were compared among groups of 30 normal, 60 learning-disabled, and 20 brain-damaged adults aged 17 to 29 yr. The normal and learning-disabled groups (which did not differ) had significantly fewer asymmetries than the brain-damaged group. However, 36% of the learning-disabled group who had a Halstead Impairment Index greater than or equal to 0.4, also had significantly more sensorimotor asymmetries than the normals. These results support the idea of an association between neurobehavioral deficits and learning disabilities for this age group.

A comparison of deaf, normal, and brain damaged adults on a tachistoscopic task

Printed words and letters, pictures of signed words, and pictures of finger-spelled letters were presented tachistoscopically to deaf, normal, and brain-damaged adults. The findings suggest that (1) the deaf show no cerebral asymmetry for any of the material but found identification of the stimuli very difficult unless a forced-choice recognition procedure was used or the exposure time was very long; (2) both the normal and the brain-damaged groups show left hemisphere superiority for printed material but no cerebral specialization for signed material; (3) the left-right hemisphere difference is more marked in the brain-damaged group regardless of which hemisphere showed most damage. This may be explained, at least in some cases, by impaired transfer across the corpus callosum.

Differentiation of praxis among children.

This study was designed to evaluate the conceptual model proposed by Luria to identify different types of dyspraxia in learning-disabled (LD) children. The types of apraxia investigated were kinesthetic, optic-spatial, symbolic, and dynamic. In addition, the study explored differential performance on tasks of praxis in learning-disabled children as a function of their Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) IQ patterns. The subjects included 41 LD and 17 normal children ages 108 months to 153 months. They were administered The Praxis Test for Children, a compilation based on Luria's division of types of praxis with brain-damaged adults. Results indicated that the test differentiated between the LD and normal groups on the dynamic and optic-spatial tests. Data analyzed for the LD children with a significant WISC-R discrepancy between their Verbal IQ and Performance IQ profile yielded no difference between these two IQ groups. Results were discussed in terms of the need to investigate individual patterns of performance in the differentiation of dyspraxia.

Neuropsychological test findings for normal, learning-disabled, and brain-damaged young adults.

Neuropsychological test findings for normal, learning-disabled, and brain-damaged young adults.

Neuropsychological test findings for normal, learning-disabled, and brain-damaged young adults.

Neuropsychological test findings for normal, learning-disabled, and brain-damaged young adults.

In re Sharon Siebert: decision regarding a brain-damaged adult.

In re Sharon Siebert: decision regarding a brain-damaged adult.

Auditory processing of brain-damaged adults under competitive listening conditions

Right CVAs, mild left CVAs, and non-brain-damaged adults received the Token Test under three conditions: quiet, white noise, and speech babble. Left CVAs performed most poorly of all groups in all conditions experiencing difficulty with subtests III, IV, and V. Right CVAs were inferior to controls on each of these three subtests in the speech babble condition only. Thus, right CVA difficulty with both memory and syntactic tasks was demonstrated in speech babble. These results are explained by the hypothesis that both hemispheres are necessary to process auditory information under complex listening conditions. Total brain capacity of right CVA patients may be overloaded if either memory load or linguistic complexity is increased in the presence of certain types of listening competition.

La reconnaissance du visage chez l'enfant normal

Faces'recognition by normal children : comparison with brain damaged adults. - Children (5 to 12 year old; n = 120) are submitted to pairs of faces in a same- different task; faces are drawings with seven binary cues. Experimental variables are: perceptual or mnesic task, duration of presentation or interval, verbal reinforcement, verbal or non-verbal response and similarity of stimuli; 32 tests of 8 items each are then constructed. Subjects' variables are the age (4 groups) and the sex. For both tasks. 6 factors anovas are computed on both scores and delay of response. Complex results are obtained; it appears mainly that the best performances are produced by the 9-10 year old children, that the reinforcement improves the performance (but depending on the age) and that a high similarity increases the difficulty. Moreover, comparisons with adults indicate (a) a similarity between the youngest children and right brain-damaged adults and (b) a similarity between the 9-10 year old children and normal adults.

Language Development in Another Mode: The Acquisition of Signs by a Brain-Damaged Adult

A 49-year-old brain-damaged, dysarthric patient was given in instructional program in sign language communication tailored to the needs of his particular disability. The man learned a large lexicon of signs and showed improvement in his sicial behavior over the nine-month period of the study. The patient’s success in acquiring a sign language vocabulary must be viewed in the light of a medical evaluation of severe cerebral damage, an aphasic condition, and partial paralysis, all resulting from an accident that occurred more than ten years before. This improvement is in contrast with his past history of failure to respond to speech therapy.

Visual organization ability in brain-damaged adults.

49 brain-damaged patients (15 with left-hemisphere lesions, 19 with right-hemisphere lesions, and 15 with bilateral lesions) and 17 non-brain-damaged patients were administered the Hooper Visual Organization Test. Non-brain-damaged patients performed significantly better than the brain-damaged patients; however, the differences among the brain-damaged patients were not significant. Hooper Visual Organization Test seems valuable for identifying organicity but its usefulness for determining lateralization is limited. It is also suggested that both hemispheres form a close functional loop in subserving visual organization ability. A hypothetical diagram has been proposed to describe the functional dynamics of the visual synthesis ability measured by the Visual Organization Test.

Self-Correctional Strategies In The Conversational Speech Of Aphasic And Nonaphasic Brain Damaged Adults

Self-correctional strategies in the conversational speech of aphasic and non-aphasic brain-damaged adults were analyzed for frequency of occurrence and percentage of success. Similar strategies were used by groups resulting in the same rank order of most to least successful for delay, association, description and generalization. Further analysis of self-correctional strategies among aphasic subgroups indicated that frequency and success of strategies were not significantly related to type of aphasia. Severity level and success of a particular strategy appeared to depend on the amount of information about the target word which was available to the subject at the time of error.

Reduction of self-destructive behavior by overcorrection.

Foxx and Azrin (1972) described a restitution or overcorrection procedure for eliminating ritualistic and other disruptive behaviors in retarded children. The rationale of the procedure was to educate the child to assume individual responsibility for the disruption generated by his misbehavior by requiring him to restore the disturbed situation to an improved state. In the case of ritualistic behaviors, the child is required to make a response incompatible with the ritualistic movement. Overcorrection has been used successfully to eliminate aggression in retarded and brain-damaged adults (Foxx & Azrin, 1972) , some motiliry disturbances in autistic children (Foxx & Azrin, 1973a), and inappropriate toileting behavior (Foxx & Azrin, 1973b; Freeman & Pribble, 1974). The case reported here extends the use of the overcorrection procedure to self-destructive behavior. The subject was a 6%-yr.-old female child, hospitalized at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California, Los Angeles. Her primary diagnosis was aphasia. However, on admission she exhibited a number of behavior problems. The behavior focused on in this report was nail-picking. S continually picked her nails and often caused bleeding. The procedure employed was to hold the child's hands down by her side for 1 min. each time she engaged in picking her nails. iavish positive reinforcement was given whenever she was engaging in appropriate behavior. The child attended school for 3 hr. daily, and it was during this time that the intervention was first made. Bursts of nail-picking were recorded in 30-min. intervals daily. Five days of baseline data preceded the intervention.

Aspects of the Clinical Application of the Interrelationship between Gross Physical Development and Skills and the Acquisition and Re-Acquisition of Language in Brain-Damaged Children and Adults

Aspects of the Clinical Application of the Interrelationship between Gross Physical Development and Skills and the Acquisition and Re-Acquisition of Language in Brain-Damaged Children and Adults

Decruitment and the Growth of Loudness in the Ears of Brain-Damaged Adults

The inability of temporal lobe damaged patients to perform the ABLB and satisfactorily balance tones of equal intensity has been called “decruitment”. Poor performance has been attributed to an abnormally slow growth of loudness in the ear contralateral to the lesion. Seven patients with temporal lobe damage, seven with brain damage exclusive of the auditory system, and seven normals were asked to match loudness (ABLB) and to build a Sone scale by halving and doubling the loudness of a 1000 Hz tone. The normals performed all tasks well. The braindamaged (non-auditory system) showed slight variation on the ABLB, and normal Sone scales. The temporal lobe group evidenced decruitment on the ABU, but produced normal Sone scales. Decruitment is apparently not an abnormal growth of loudness, but rather the inability to integrate and relate auditory tasks presented dichotically.

Acoustic cue discrimination in adult aphasia.

Discrimination ability of 15 aphasic, 10 normal, and 10 brain-damaged nonaphasic adults was assessed using a specially constructed discrimination test designed to assess ability to discriminate important acoustic cues for distinctive features of phonemes. A single acoustic cue, such as stopgap duration, spectrum of a consonantal burst peak, or direction and extent of a second-formant transition, created the only difference in minimal pairs which were otherwise acoustically identical. Three of the subtests utilized a spectral cue and three a temporal cue. All subtests used human rather than synthesized speech, and each was altered by a variety of dubbing, filtering, and splicing procedures. Of the 15 aphasic subjects studied, seven failed both the discrimination test and a comprehension test, suggesting that their comprehension disturbances may arise from reduced ability to discriminate acoustic cues for speech sounds. In contrast, both the normal and brain-damaged nonaphasic groups were successful on the discrimination test, suggesting that failure on these discrimination tasks was not simply a function of age or brain damage per se. Moreover, discrimination failure by the aphasics was not evenly distributed. Rather, the aphasic subjects experienced significantly more failures on the temporal cues and were generally successful on the subtests involving cues of a spectral nature.

Spatial orientation in normal children and in children with early brain injury

Fifty-one brain-injured children (7:7—17:0) were compared with fifty-two normal children (4:11—9:11) with respect to their ability to walk the paths indicated on ten visually presented maps. In an earlier study, using the same patterns, adults with cerebral injury sustained at maturity showed spatial orientation deficits associated with language deficits and elevated two-point somatosensory thresholds. Brain-damaged children were worse than controls beyond differences in their respective MA's, but their deficits were not associated with either language or somatosensory impairment. Rather, spatial errors were most pronounced in Ss with low performance scores on the WISC whether or not their language scores were relatively high. Unlike either normal children or normal and brain-damaged adults, the Ss of this study had inordinate difficulty taking diagonal routes.

Stimulus rotation and visual scanning in Ss with copying disability.

Rotation of squares increases copying difficulty for young children and brain-damaged adults. Explanations stress both perceptual and cognitive factors. Records of visual scanning were used as an index of attention to areas of the stimulus field. Perceptual explanations were translated into scanning terms. The degree to which scanning is consistent with expectations inferred from perceptual theories was examined. Scanning of squares, rotated and unrotated, was compared for 7 normals and 7 adults with impaired copying ability. Variables were attention to contour, enclosed form, and ground. Conclusions were that: (a) normals scan rotated and unrotated squares similarly; (b) impaired Ss' scanning of rotated squares is different from normal scanning and from their own scanning of unrotated squares; (c) the differences found do not follow theoretical expectation.

A note on hyperesthesia in children with early brain damage

Among forty-one children with congenital encephalopathy manifested by minimal motor symptoms, eight showed definite hyperesthesia on tests of light touchon thumbs and palms, and on tests of two-point resolution on their palms. In this sense, their tactile sensitivity and acuity were paradoxically better than in one hundred and four children without brain damage who served as controls. Such genuine hyperesthesia has not been found in comparable quantitative studies of tactile function in brain-damaged adults.

Conceptual retraining of brain-damaged adults.

A method for conceptually retraining brain-damaged adults was devised. The idea evolved from the work of three investigators: Delacato, Piaget, and Vygotsky. The method involves teaching the brain-damaged person to use increasingly complex schemas. The concepts begin with the simple ones of shape and color and progress to more complex ones such as “it makes noise” and “edible.” An exploratory study using randomized experimental and control groups of seven persons yielded positive results. The experimental patients were able to use concepts they had been taught as well as to build new concepts significantly better than the control patients. Relative youth, and greater education, together with the treatment, seem to have been effective in producing greater conceptual power among members of the experimental group.