Cristina Trivelli

Poppelreuter-Ghent's Overlapping Figures Test: its sensitivity to age, and its clinical use

This study aims to identify the cognitive variables involved in a task of visual recognition of meaningful and meaningless two-dimensional line-drawings of shapes; the Poppelreuter-Ghent Overlapping Figures Test. It was found that the performance of healthy controls was influenced by age and education, but not sex. Age and education adjusted norms are set forth. Meaningful patterns were better recognised than meaningless ones. Number of overlapping patterns, direction, and degree of rotation were among the other variables considered. Only the latter variable significantly influenced the difficulty of the task. The clinical use of this test was verified on clinical populations of patients affected by Alzheimers disease and right or left hemisphere damage. Left hemisphere damaged patients did not show deficits. Alzheimer and right hemisphere damaged patients were impaired and the degree of rotation significantly influenced their performance. In conclusion, the Poppelreuter-Ghents Test is a multicomponential task, the visuo-spatial components of which were shown to be the most important.

Living and non-living categories. Is there a “normal” asymmetry?

A picture naming task and a semantic memory verbal questionnaire were given to normal subjects to assess the possible asymmetry between knowledge for non-living and living things. We first examined 60 elderly subjects with low education. Asymmetry between non-living and living things was found in the semantic knowledge questionnaire and living things fared worse. This difference was not explained by discrepancy in item frequency, familiarity or prototypicality. Using the same questionnaire, we analysed difficulty judgements given by younger, better-educated subjects: questions about living things were slightly, but significantly more difficult than questions regarding non-living things. In order to check for a possible sample bias, we submitted another verbal questionnaire with an analogous structure to different judges and replicated the previous results. These findings are discussed with regard to the selective semantic memory deficit for living things observed in patients. We suggest that the cognitive pattern presented by these cases may be linked to, but not fully explained by the greater difficulty living things present for normal subjects.

Dissociation between recency and span: Neuropsychological and experimental evidence

This article reports dissociations between verbal span and the recency portion of the serial position curve in immediate free recall, in 2 neuropsychological case studies and in 3 experiments with normal participants. Patient A. N. presented with an impaired serial verbal span while showing an intact recency effect. The opposite pattern was observed in patient G. C., who despite a poor recency showed normal span in verbal serial recall tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 showed a recency effect with visually and auditory presented lists and written recall was resistant to the effects of articulatory suppression and of irrelevant speech, but was disrupted by the suffix effect. Experiment 3 showed that in contrast with recency, memory span was affected by articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech during presentation but not by a suffix. These findings are not consistent with the idea that span and recency measure aspects of the same memory system. Moreover, in clinical practice, they should not be used as equivalent alternatives.

Is autobiographical impairment due to a deficit of recollection? An overview of studies on Alzheimer dements, frontal and global amnesic patients

The hypothesis is discussed that retrieving autobiographical information through the remote memory archives is mainly an organizational, searching task. The organizational activity involved in AB-retrieving is believed to take the form of Williams’ (1978) “recollection” process. It is agreed that planning is one functional aspect of attention, and in this way recollection should be viewed as a mainly attention-driven, step-wise planned activity. On the grounds above, the assumption is made that there should be a substantial number of frontally damaged patients, possibly dysexecutive in behaviour, who are impaired on AB-retrieval as a consequence of impaired recollection. Patients sharing damage to their rostral neocortex are easily found, as well as patients selectively bereft of all, or part of, their pre-frontal areas (frontal patients, F/pts), among most Alzheimer dements (AD/pts) and global amnesics (GA/pts), whose amnesia followed widespread brain-damage (viz., an extra-cerebral anoxic insult). For this reason, the patients in our studies belong to the neurological categories above. What we are going to present in this chapter, along with fresh findings, is an attempt to lend common understanding to neuropsychological findings on autobiographical memory (ABM) that we have collected over the past three years (Borrini et al., 1989; Dall’Ora et al., 1989; Della Sala et al., submitted).

Recovery of object recognition in a case of simultanagnosia.

A case of visual agnosia is described. The patient, V C, complained of difficulties in identifying visual stimuli, after a stroke in the left occipital lobe. A neuropsychological examination demonstrated a range of symptoms consistent with (ventral) simultanagnosia, and a reaching disorder--suggesting Balints syndrome. The patients object recognition ability improved considerably over time.