Neuropsychological Disorders associated with Subcortical Lesions

For more than a century, the cerebral cortex has been regarded as the site of cognitive activities such as language, thought, and spatial awareness. In the past 20 years, however, an increasing amount of evidence has accumulated to suggest that subcortical structures such as the thalamus and tha basal ganglia may participate in specific aspects of mental activity. This book is the first to be entirely devoted to this issue, and includes contributions from an international group of researchers. They describe the clinical patterns of neuropsychological disorders found in patients with subcortical lesions, and report the results of animal research. New imaging techniques allow the disorders to be correlated with the size and site of the lesion, and the pattern that emerges from these findings is that cognitive functions are mediated by complex neural circuits, involving both cortical and subcortical structures.

Part I: General Introduction: S.F. Cappa & G. Vallar: Neuropsychological disorders after subcortical lesions: implications for the neural models of language and spatial attention; I. Divac & R.G.E. Oberg: Subcortical mechanisms in cognition; E.T. Rolls & S. Johnstone: Neurophysiological analysis of striatal function; R.K. Deuel & T.W. Anderson: procedural and symbolic learning after large unilateral thalamic lesions in monkeys; Part II: Subcortical Lesions, Memory and Amnesia: D.Y. von Cramon: Focal cerebral lesions damaging (subcortical) fibre projections related to memory and learning functions in man; N.R. Graff-Radford, D. Tranel, G.W. Van Hoesen & J.P. Brandt: Diencephalic amnesia; D. Perani, L.D. Kartsounis & A. Costello: Korsakoff's psychosis: a neuropsychological and positron-emission tomography study of two cases; Part III: Cognitive Function in Extrapyramidal Disease: C. Lee & R. Brown: Use of advance information in Parkinson's disease; J.A. Saint-Cyr, A.E. Taylor, L.L. Trépanier & A.E. Lang: The caudate nucleus: head ganglion of the habit system; C.-W. Wallesch, H.O. Karnath & P. Zimmermann: Is there a frontal lobe dysfunction in Parkinson's disease? A comparison of the effects of Parkinson's disease and circumscribed frontal lobe lesions in a maze-learning task; E.J. Metter: Brain glucose metabolism in subcortical dementias; Part IV: Aphasia, Apraxia, Neglect, and Subcortical Lesions: B. Crosson: Is the striatum invoved in language?; M.A. Naeser: Relationship between lesion in deep, subcortical white matter areas on chronic CT scans and recovery of speech and comprehension in chronic aphasia; L.A. Vignolo, M.E. Macario & S.F. Cappa: Clinical-CT scan correlations in a prospective series of patients with acute left-hemispheric subcortical stroke; A. Kertesz: Subcortical agraphia; S. Della Sala, A. Basso, M. Laicona & C. Papagno: Subcortical localization of ideomotor apraxia: a review and an experimental study; I.P. Martins & J.M. Ferro: Acquired subcortical lesions in children; J.-F. Démonet, P. Celsis, M. Puel, D. Cardebat, J.P. Marc-Vergnes & A. Rascol: Thalamic and non-thalamic subcortical aphasia: a neurolinguistic and SPECT approach; M. Puel, F.-F. Démonet, D. Cardebat, I. Berry, P. Celsis, J.P. Marc-Vergnes & A. Rascol: Three topographical types of thalamic aphasia: a neurolinguistic, NMR, and SPECT study; J. Ferro, G. Cantinho, A. Levy & F. Godinho: Subcortical neglect: is cortical diaschisis relevant?; J.C. Baron, M. Levasseur, B. Mazoyer, F. Legault-Demare, F. Mauguiere, S. Pappata, P. Jedynak, P. Derome, J. Cambier, S. Tran-Dinh & H. Cambon: Cortical hypometabolism and neuropsychological impairment in unilateral thalamic lesions; M.P. Alexander: Speech and language deficits after subcortical lesions of the left hemisphere: a clinical, CT, and PET study; E.J. Metter: Role of subcortical structures in aphasia: evidence from studies of resting cerebral glucose metabolism.