Processing of faces by patients with unilateral hemisphere lesions. I. Dissociation between judgments of facial affect and facial identity

In this study, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) subjects performed significantly worse than LHD and NHD controls across a series of seven facial identity and facial affect tasks. Even when the patient groups were statistically equated on a measure of visuoperceptual ability, the RHD group remained impaired on three emotional tasks--naming, picking, and discriminating emotional faces. These findings suggest that the defects shown by RHD patients on facial affect tasks cannot be solely attributed to defects in visuoperceptual processing and that the right-hemisphere superiority for processing facial affect exists above and beyond its superiority for processing facial identity.     

Scripts or scraps: reconsidering the development of sequential understanding

A growing literature attests to temporally ordered recall of events by children under 2 years of age. Other data suggest a developmental sequence wherein the ability to reproduce unfamiliar and/or arbitrarily ordered events, and familiar events in other than canonical order develops well after the first ordered productions of events. Early ordering is thus argued to be dependent upon familiarity, rather than upon general temporal principles. This suggestion was investigated by using elicited imitation to assess 21-month-olds' recall of familiar-canonical, familiar-reversed, novel-causal, and novel-arbitrary event sequences. Subjects reproduced canonical and both types of novel sequences in modeled order. On reversed sequences they vacillated between reproducing the events as modeled and "correcting" them to canonical order. The results suggest that temporal organization is not imposed upon an existing unordered event representation, but rather, is an integral aspect of the representation from its initial construction. It is suggested that young children's difficulty with reversed sequences may be attributed to a reluctance to reorganize existing representations, rather than to the absence of applicable temporal principles.     

The effect of increased incentive on free recall by learning-disabled and nondisabled children

Immediate free recall by learning-disabled and nondisabled children was compared under two incentive conditions. Recall of the first few words of each list by disabled children and younger nondisabled children was lower than that by older nondisabled children, and receiving a monetary reward increased early list item recall by older disabled and nondisabled learners. These findings suggest that elaborative encoding processes, such as rehearsal, are impaired in younger disabled and nondisabled children and that receiving a reward increased elaborative encoding by older children. Similar recall of the last few list items by all groups suggests that attention and immediate memory are comparable in disabled and nondisabled children of different ages. Receiving a reward increased recall of the last few list items by younger disabled and nondisabled children, suggesting that a reward increased attention, immediate memory, or both, in these groups. Because receiving a reward increased recall equally in all groups, lower motivation did not appear to be responsible for the lower recall by younger nondisabled children and learning-disabled children.     

Results of combined treatment of malignant brain tumors with various cytostatic protocols

Nowadays best results in the treatment of malignant brain tumors can be obtained with an interdisciplinary combined treatment (operation, radiation, antineoplastic chemotherapy). We treated 83 patients with gliomas after operation with a combined radiation/chemotherapy. Chemotherapy was performed by two different schemas (Israel n = 49, COMP n = 34). Both groups had the same structure concerning the 10 most important prognostic factors. The median survival time was found to be 26.1 months in the Israel-group and 22.8 months respectively in the COMP-group. The number of the long-time survivors is increasing in the COMP-group.     

Effect of age at the time of illness, tumor grade and Karnofsky value on the therapy result in patients with glioma of the cerebral cortex treated with combined therapy

49 patients with gliomas were investigated by means of life table analysis with regard to the influence of age, grade of the tumor and Karnofsky-score on the result of the treatment. The grade of the tumor and the age are factors of high prognostic value. They significantly influence the survival time of patients with gliomas treated by a combination treatment (operation, radiation, polychemotherapy; median survival times: grade 2: 50.4 months; grade 3: 28.5 months; grade 4: 18.9 months; group younger than 40 years: 49.2 months; older than 40 years: 21.9 months). Patients with different Karnofsky-scores show no differences concerning their median survival times (Karnofsky-score 50-70: 34.2 months; 80-100: 31.8 months).     

Electrodermal discrimination of familiar but not unfamiliar faces in prosopagnosia

It has been previously shown that prosopagnosics can electrodermally "recognize" faces they cannot verbally identify and with which they feel no familiarity. This study extended previous results by showing that electrodermal discrimination of faces exists only on a famous face identification task, and not on a matching-to-sample task involving unfamiliar faces. This suggests that electrodermal recognition reflects the activation of stored identity-specific information built up on the basis of past contact with faces, and provides a psychophysiological distinction between familiar and unfamiliar face processing. Implications for cognitive models of face recognition, and for understanding the nature of prosopagnosia, are discussed.     

Diagnostic value of the H-reflex index in alcoholic polyneuropathy

We examined the H-reflex-index of triceps surae muscle (HI) and the motor nerve conduction velocity of the tibial nerve (mNLG) of 56 alcohol dependent patients. The results were compared with neurologic disorders, duration of the dependency and the type of alcoholism according to Jellinek. The HI showed significant more pathological changes than the mNLG.     

Drinking behavior in the chronic phase of alcoholism

40 patients in the chronic phase of alcohol addition were questioned in order to identify drinking stereotypes with regard to consumption in the course of the day and year. Alcohol intake reaches a maximum between 8 and 9 PM. No clear differences were found in this respect between days of abstinence for social reasons and days without such social pressures. In the course of the year, alcohol consumption reaches a maximum in autumn and a minimum in spring. The uniform, repetitive drinking rituals are suspected to have become habitual in the course of several years until they are finally unaffected by environment. This leads to a convergence of addiction forms, but the duration of the daily abstinence period still permits differentiation between gamma and delta addicts even when addiction has reached an advanced stage.