Representational drawing following brain injury.

Publication date: Available online 6 August 2019Source: NeuropsychologiaAuthor(s): Linda Carson, Alexandre Filipowicz, Britt Anderson, James DanckertAbstractResearch has shown that damage to either the left or right hemisphere can lead to deficits in visuoconstructional skills including drawing and figure copying. Nevertheless, research would suggest that the nature of the deficits arising from left and right brain injury are distinct in nature if not severity, with the right hemisphere, and parietal cortex specifically, seen as critical for obtaining accurate spatial relations and the left hemisphere important for effective organisation (i.e., executive function). Much of this work on drawing and figure copying following brain damage has rested on qualitative assessments or crude marking scales with descriptive anchors for what constitutes good or poor performance. We employed quantitative analyses of drawings developed to assess accuracy in novice and expert artists. We analyzed drawings of a cube and a star in 50 patients (23, left brain damaged: LBD; 27 right brain damaged: RBD) who had suffered strokes. Our analysis was sensitive to the presence of neglect on the cube (i.e., missing left sided details) with voxel-wise lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) highlighting involvement of expected brain regions (superior temporal and supramarginal gyri). With left-sided omissions removed from analyses, we failed to find any difference between LBD and RBD patients. While the presence o...

Source: Neuropsychologia - August 7, 2019 Category: Neurology Source Type: research