SPATIAL ANALYSIS IN CHILDREN WITH FOCAL BRAIN INJURY

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

DESCRIPTION: The proposed research, a five-year prospective longitudinal study, aims to examine the early development of spatial analysis, which is considered to involve the ability to specify the parts, configuration, and the integration of parts and configurations. The specific aims are: 1) to define patterns of deficit associated with early injury; 2) to look at reaction time studies for spatial analysis in real time; 3) to examine longitudinal patterns of development in these skills after early focal injury; 4) to look at cross-domain spatial processing; and 4) to extend previous work by applying an fMRI protocol for examining patterns of neural activation in spatial analytic processing. Three cognitive-behavioral studies and one fMRI study are proposed. The studies aims to extend the previous findings from the applicants showing left and right-sided early-acquired brain lesions in children to have similar pattern of spatial analysis deficits to adults with later-acquired left or right lesions. The new information from the proposed research would concern description of extra spatial analysis tasks by brain region, with a view to comparing construction and perception of space information, and the examination of differences in neural organization following early focal injury.