Higher Brain Function Research
Online ISSN : 1880-6716
Print ISSN : 0285-9513
ISSN-L : 0285-9513
Volume 11, Issue 3
Displaying 1-8 of 8 articles from this issue
Educational lecture
Original article
  • Youko Sano, Masahiro Kato
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 161-171
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         The abilities of visual recognition were studied in a 72-years old right-handed man having disturbances in recognizing familiar faces and memorizing or discriminating unfamiliar faces, without other symptoms of severe agnosia on daily life. These symptoms had been observed for 18 years since sustaining cerebral infarction.
        As a result, the patient showed the disability not only in recognizing familiar faces and memorizing unfamiliar faces, but also in all similar tasks demanding detailed visual recognition. He had difficulties in tasks using photographs, such as discrimination of facial expressions, identification of a person with different facial expressions, and also discrimination of different models of automobiles. He also had difficulties in identification of handwriting and recognition of complex figures like superimposed figures and mazes.
        The disturbance with prosopagnosia has been defined as being limited to faces. But in these patients recognition of other visually complex objects has not been fully investigated precisely. In this case the sympton of agnosia for faces may have heretofore drawn the attention, because there are not so many daily occasions which demand visual recognition as difficult as facial recognition.
        Therefore the underlying mechanisms of prosopagnosia and subclassificattion should be further discussed.
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  • — Comparison of Efficacy of Two Programs by Single-subject Experiment Design —
    Tomoyuki Kojima, Akira Uno, Masahiro Kato
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 172-179
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         We administered two training programs for Kana (phonemic letter) writing to a case of agraphia who manifested a severe disturbance in Kana writing in spite of only slight disturbance in her Kanji (ideographic letter) system.
        In one training program the subject was required only to copy Kana letters. In the other, which we called the “Key word method” she was required to form a paired association between a Kana letter and a Kanji letter having the same sound in the first syllable as the coupled Kana. We compared the two training programs by means of single-subject experimental design, and discussed differences in efficacy as well as the psycholinguistic mechanism of disturbance in the Kana writing of this case.
        Results indicated that the efficacy of copy training was restricted to the period of the experiment, but the efficacy of the "Key word method" lasted after the experiment and functioned as a selfgenerated cue.
        The “Key word method” was thought to be a strategy which facilitates retrieval of Kana letters by way of information processing of the Kanji system, which was comparatively preserved in this case.
        The fact that the intervention which used as a bypass route the information processing route comparatively preserved was more efficient than direct intervention to the information processing route severely disturbed indicates that in this case, the difficulty in retrieval of Kana letters was not a breakdown in the “engram” of the Kana grapheme, but disturbance of the “"access route” to the engram.
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  • Jun Tanemura
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 180-186
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         The aim of this study was to analyze associations between repetition, reading aloud of Kanji and Kana words, and confrontation naming. The subjects were 20 moderate aphasics who showed dissociations among speech modalities. They were examind for 11 word level language modalities, and experiments were undertaken on deblocking of impaired speech modalities through intact speech modalities. Six Patterns of speech disorder were identified : word retrieving, phonological processing, letter processing and compound disorders of these various processes. After reading aloud of kana, performance in reading Kanji aloud, repetition and confrontation naming were improved. From these findings, it was concluded that phonological route (grapheme-phoneme conversion) plays an important role in facilitating speech production.
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  • Masaharu Maeda, Hiroshi Nagasawa, Koji Yorizumi, Setsuko Sayama, Hiros ...
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 187-194
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         We observed a total of 6 cases of cerebral infarction, including 5 of the right and one of the left anterior cerebral arteries, which required compulsive manipulation of tools. We recognized the following observations in addition to ordinary phenomena.
        1) The phenomenon of synkinesia between hand, face and mouth occurred in some cases.
        2) Compulsive manipulations of tools are provoked not only visually and tactually but also by mere imagination.
        3) Compulsive manipulations of tools which are not observed usually may be provoked according to provocative limb sites.
        4) Some cases showed long-term persistent symtoms in addition to transitory ones.
        5) Cases of long-term persistent symptoms displayed the pathological grasp phenomenon, severe motor paralysis and extensive lesions including the corpus callosum as common findings.
        6) The hand on the affected side showed will-independent, aimless pill-rolling-like motions, though without as definite a tendency as observed in Parkinson's disease.
        7) Some cases, in which a right frontal lobar lesion induced compulsive manipulation of tools, were noted to have the onset of the pathological grasp phenomenon.
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  • — Comparison with Patients with Hearing Disorders —
    Sachiko Kimura, Akira Uno, Hiroko Igarashi, Masahiro Kato
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 195-199
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         In this study, we examined whether the japanese law for the welfare of the physically disabled appropriately evaluates the handicaps in daily living of severe aphasic patients. The subjects consisted of two groups. One was comprised of 18 aphasic patients who met the criteria for the 3rd grade of speech and language disability according to the japanese law for the welfare of the physically disabled. The other was a control group comprised of 11 patients with hearing disorders who met the criteria for the 2nd grade of hearing disability according to the same law. As a result, aphasic patients were significantly worse than the hearing disorder patients with regard to the following 3 points : CADL (Communicative Abilities in Daily Living-A Test of Functional Communication for Aphasic Adults) communication level, CADL Communication level with some supportive methods, and accuracy in acquiring information concerning social events. The amount of information available has also increased since 1949, when the japanese law for the welfare of the physically disabled was enacted. This may have made the handicap of aphasics, who suffer with respect to all modalities of language, greater than that of the hearing disabled, who suffer with respect to only one modality. Based on the above, we believe that the japanese law for the welfare of the physically disabled must be reformed accordingly.
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  • Masaaki Nagafuchi
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 200-207
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         Four cases of crossed aphasia with left unilateral spatial agnosia were reported. One was a 71-year-old male, and two were 59 and 60-year-old females. They had all suffered from strokes. The other was a 45-year-old female with a brain tumor. All CT-scans demonstrated low density areas in the right hemisphere only and the left ones were all intact. All speech and language skills were assessed with the standard language test for aphasia. One case was of sensory aphasia and the other three were of motor aphasia. It was found that they showed agrammatism and agraphia in common, but were near normal in auditory comprehension ; that is, expressive deficits were more prominent than receptive. All cases displayed left unilateral spatial agnosia in drawing test.
        Several reported cases of crossed aphasia have been found to have had good recovery rates. However, the present cases showd little improvement in agrammatism, agraphia and left unilateral spatial agnosia. The literature on crossed aphasia to date has focused on the linguistic characteristics of crossed aphasia, with little reference to concomitant visuospatial deficits closely resembling those usually found with lesions of the nondominant hemisphere. As to the presence of spatial symptoms in crossed aphasia, Henderson concluded that right-sided language represen tation does not usually affect right hemisphere dominance for attention and visuospatial perception. At any rate, it is left unexplored whether their left hemisphere ability to take over spatial functions after right brain damage is different from that of the general right-handed population.
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  • Sadao Nakamura, Masahiro Asai, Hideo Hosaki, Kiyoshi Yanai
    1991 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 208-212
    Published: 1991
    Released on J-STAGE: July 05, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
         We report here a patient considered to have Alzheimer's disease. The condition in initially presented as memory failure at approximately 52 years of age and thereafter she gradually showed abnormal behavior, confabulation and delusion of pregnancy. Dementia showed a progressive course and in parallel, linguistically interesting findings were observed : dementia became severe the size of her vocabulary decreased with increasing difficulty in communicating and expression was limited to emotional languages.
        Philologically the following changes occured in a monologue pattern : from repetition language to echolalia, logoclonia, rhymed specified repetition language style and arrangement of phonemes with a fixed pattern and rhythm.
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