TACTILE SPATIAL IMPAIRMENT AND UNILATERAL CEREBRAL DAMAGE

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Abstract
Relationship between spatial impairment and hemispheric lesions was evaluated using a tactually guided task. A simplified version of the form-board test was given to 44 right brain-damaged patients and to 36 left brain-damaged patients, further subdivided according to the presence or absence of visual field defects (VFD). Patients were blindfolded and were required to perform the task 5 times consecutively with the hand ipsilateral to the injured hemisphere. Each trial was scored for the total time employed to insert blocks into corresponding openings. At the end of the test, the blindfold was removed, and subjects were requested to place the blocks on the table in the same arrangement as they remembered them to be on the board. The performance of the group was right hemisphere lesions and VFD was significantly inferior to that of any other group. The rate of learning over the 5 trials, however, was not different among groups and showed in all of them a highly significant improvement between the first and the second trials. On the block arrangement task patients with VFD scored lower but, within this group, the right-sided patients did not do worse than the left-sided group, a finding which seems to indicate that topographical memory does not play a major role in form-board learning.