Seminar notes for The Mind Detective

The Mind Detective Seminars: Case study

Seminar week 3




Patient case study

Whats gone wrong?

 Labourer
 RTA
 Skull fracture, brain contrusion, haematoma (operated to clear)
 WAIS --> performance = 50
 Verbal = 83
 Control mean is 100
 Digit span 5 (slightly low but in normal range)

Language

 No word finding difficulties
 Spontaneous speech well formed and grammatical
 Intact oral spelling
 Alexia with agraphia (reading and writing)
 Retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia for verbal material – these deficits decreased
with time

Vision

 Problem identifying objects by sight
 Problem identifying objects by pictures

,  Objects identified by touch
 Impaired at naming colours
 Impaired at matching colour to item
 Colour discrimination fine

Object naming problem

 Distinguish between visual agnosia, anomia and optic aphasia
 Apperceptive = copying problems/associative = can copy but not recognise
 Visual agnosia = problems recognising objects from vision
 Anomia = problems naming objects
 Optic aphasia = problems naming objects but can identify from sight or touch



Tests

 Touch recognise object and describe --> semantic system intact if succeed (but do other
tests too)
 Descriptions of objects --> apperceptive may have damage to visual description system
 Associative --> damage somewhere around semantics system
 Name objects from their verbal definitions --> good
 Name objects from touch --> medium
 Name visually presented --> poor
 Gestures how to use object could be ok when name was incorrect (semantic but non-verbal)
 Suggests problem in the visual input/representation part (output naming intact from other
tasks)



Seminar week 4

So far

 Patient is not agnosic
 As agnosic patient could not recognise object  patient here could gesture when name was
incorrect
 Semantic system must be accessed in some way as patient knows gestures
 Optic aphasia – can gesture correctly for objects they cannot name

Optic aphasia explanations

- Damage effecting communication between left and right hemisphere? (anatomical)
- Functional  two kinds of semantics (visual and verbal)
- Visual = what they look like and what things link to this, actions that can be done with object
(based on structural form)
- Verbal = name of object
- Some arguments that semantic system is not divided in this way

Other possibilities

- Gestures are not precise and are hard to score
- Rough information to drive gestures could come from visual information alone without
knowing what the object is (structure gives idea of what you can do with it)