Psychological Studies on the Underlying Mechanisms of Perceptual and Cognitive Dysfunctions

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1. The brain-damage projecta) People with Pick disease are likely to sustain loss of semantic memory for words and objects. Close examination of three patients with temporal Pick disease revealed that the symptoms might include loss of semantic memory for actions. b) "Conduction apraxia" means selective disorder of skilled action involving objects (transitive action). The fact that patients with this disorder could not imitate novel postures suggested that conduction apraxia is caused by dysfunctional information processing concerning bodily positions. c) Visuo-spatial problems associated with agenesis of corpus callosum can be explained by lowered efficacy of the anterior commisure in communicating visuo-spatial information. d) infarction in the territory of right posterior cerebral artery causes pure agnosia for streets and defective route finding that do not accompany visual agnosia for other stimuli. e) Lesions in the superior parietal lobule result in agraphia only for musical scores. f) Patients with global aphasia, who have suffered complete loss of verbal functions, can maintain some ability to comprehend and express numbers, as well as ability to calculate.2. The congenital blind and amblyopia projectThe process in which patients with congenital blind develop stereoscopic vision after surgery was described in detail.3. The mental retardation projectThe members showed that autistic children who had no language could develop verbal skills through continual practice with written words. Also, it was suggested that children with mental retardation, who could not respond correctly to the false belief tasks, could develop the theory of mind when the relationship between seeing and knowing was taught in simple settings.