PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

E E Brodie

Publications and source records attributed to E E Brodie.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Improving the clinical diagnosis of personal neglect: a reformulated comb and razor test.

Beschin and Robertson (1997) devised a simple clinical test of left personal neglect, which characterises personal grooming behaviour according to the proportion of the total activity that is directed to the left side of the body. Although this test proved highly reliable, and more sensitive than prior diagnostic techniques, its formulation may yet be improved. The present paper reports a reanalysis of Beschin and Robertson's (1997) data, using additional control subjects, and a formula which characterises personal neglect as a lateral bias of behaviour rather than as a lateralised deficit. It is shown that this formula greatly enhances the test's sensitivity to the behavioural abnormalities of brain damaged patients, and it is recommended that this modification be adopted for the future diagnosis of personal neglect.

Aged↗
PubMed1996

Is left always right? Directional deviations in visual line bisection as a function of hand and initial scanning direction.

Directional deviations in visual line bisection were investigated using normal subjects. Significant main effects were found for hand and initial scan direction resulting from significantly greater deviations to the left by the left hand compared with the right hand and by a scan from the left compared with a scan from the right. These results suggest that the amelioration of neglect can only be inferred from the left hand deviations of neglect patients if they are significantly leftwards of the objective middle and that the degree of leftward deviation in normal subjects results from an interaction between right hemispheric activation and unilateral allocation of attention.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Memory for labor pain: context and quality.

The accuracy of memory for labor pain context and quality was examined in 33 women who had given birth 3-4 years previously, utilizing the McGill Pain Questionnaire and unstructured recollections of childbirth events. Subjects displayed very good memory for the context of labor pain but poor memory for its quality. In order to test whether recall was influenced by semantic information a second study investigated the extent and type of knowledge which exists about the nature of labor pain amongst 33 women who had never given birth. The description of labor pain provided by nuliparous women was found to be similar in terms of category selection and descriptors to that of parous women. This suggests that women have available semantic information about labor pain which may influence their pain recall or even their assessment of a pain experience.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Spatial field advantages for tactile line bisection as a function of hemispheric specialisation inferred from dichotic listening.

Thirty left-ear advantaged (LEA) and 30 right-ear advantaged (REA) right-handed subjects performed tactile line bisection (TLB) in left and right spatial fields, and at midline. REA subjects were found to perform significantly better in the right spatial field than in the left and LEA subjects significantly better in the left than in the right. Significant directional deviations were found only at midline with the left hand deviating to the right and the right hand to the left. These findings suggest that TLB is primarily a spatial task subserved by feedforward motor processes and that directional deviations are due to the differential scaling of egocentric space.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

Flash and pattern reversal visual evoked responses in normal and demented elderly.

P1 and P2 components of visual evoked responses (VERs) to flash stimuli were compared between patients diagnosed as suffering from Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (AD) and elderly controls. Additionally the P100 component of the VER to pattern reversal stimuli at high and low contrast and using large and small check patterns was compared. Significant differences between moderate AD patients and the normal elderly were found for the P2 component of the flash stimulus and for the P100 component of the high spatial frequency pattern reversal stimuli at low contrast. These findings suggest a deficit in primary visual processing and a selective deficit in secondary visual processing in moderate cases of dementia. This indicates that visual processing capacities of AD patients decline as the disease progresses in line with the continual degeneration of neuronal populations involved with vision.

Aged↗
PubMed1991

Effect of surface characteristics and style of production on naming and verification of pictorial stimuli.

Theories of object recognition that are based purely on part decomposition do not take into account the role of textural, shading, and color information, nor do they differentiate between stylistic factors in the preparation of line-drawn pictorial stimuli. To investigate these factors, naming and verification experiments were performed using line drawings, monochrome photographs, and color photographs of common objects. For line drawings, it was shown that line width, exposure, and contrast affected naming latency, which increased for lines of narrow width and extremes of exposure. Naming latencies were compared for objects drawn by a professional artist, with varying degrees of surface detail, and objects produced by a computer-aided design (CAD) system, with no surface detail. The mean naming latencies for the artist set were faster than for the CAD set, though not significantly, with a significant degree of object correlation being observed. However, in certain cases there were significant differences between objects. These were investigated in a further experiment in which subsets with common properties of present or absent surface detail were selected from the artist-drawn stimuli. It was found that the presence of surface features resulted in lower response latencies even for those objects that intuitively could be recognized by parts alone. The time to name photographic and line-drawn stimuli was compared, and a progressive decrease in naming latency from line to monochrome to color stimuli was observed. In a verification task, no significant advantage for color or monochrome photographs over line drawings was found, either when comparing stimuli of equivalent or of different mode. However, there was a tendency for the comparison of different modes to take longer than the comparison of same modes. The results are discussed in terms of theories of human visual processing and cognitive and computational models of object recognition.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Manual asymmetry in weight discrimination: hand preference or hemispheric specialization?

One-handed weight discrimination was investigated as a function of hand, hand preference and hemispheric specialization. Differential thresholds (DLs) were measured for the left and right hands and left- and right-handed male and female subjects. DLs were found to be lower for the hand contralateral to the ear that proved superior in a verbal dichotic listening task. These results establish the existence of a manual asymmetry for the discrimination of lifted weight with the advantage accruing for the hand contralateral to the non-language cerebral hemisphere.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Manual asymmetry in weight discrimination: hand or spatial-field advantage?

Sixty subjects who were either left-handed or right-handed performed one-handed weight discrimination using their left and right hands in the left and right spatial fields. Differential thresholds, for the left and right hands of both left-handed and right-handed subjects, were found to be lower in the spatial field contralateral to the ear which proved superior in a dichotic listening test. It is concluded that manual asymmetry for weight discrimination results primarily from the mapping of sensorimotor events in the spatial fields onto contralateral cerebral cortex, with an advantage in the spatial field contralateral to the nonlanguage cerebral hemisphere.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

Mass-discrimination in weightlessness and readaptation to earth's gravity.

Five members of the first Spacelab mission (STS-9) were tested on several occasions for weight-discrimination before and after the flight, and for mass-discrimination under microgravity in flight. Thresholds for mass-discrimination were higher than for preflight weight-discrimination by a factor of about 1.8, and there was no clear evidence of improvement throughout the ten day mission. Too few tests were conducted to monitor the improvement during the first two days of flight, when adaptation to weightlessness may have occurred. Subjects reported perceptual aftereffects of body heaviness for two or three days after the flight. Their weight-discrimination thresholds were raised during this period, when they were re-adapting to normal gravity. Incomplete adaptation to altered arm weight can only partly explain the raised threshold for mass-discrimination in microgravity. Differences in the sensory information available with and without gravity are discussed.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed1985

The measurement of differential thresholds for lifted weights by microcomputer-controlled apparatus.

The measurement of differential thresholds (DLs) for lifted weights normally involves lengthy test sessions. This is due partly to the statistical techniques for measuring the threshold and partly to the methods adopted to present the stimuli. Attempts to speed up test procedures tend to produce unreliable DL estimates, or to measure the sense of force or effort rather than weight perception. To facilitate the measurement of DLs for lifted weights, an Apple microcomputer was programmed to generate Wetherill tracking procedures and was interfaced with two stimulus bearing turntables. Various lifting methods are easily implemented, and DLs are reliably and quickly measured. The adaptation of the apparatus for general use in investigating the haptic sense modality is discussed.

Computers↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The analgesic effect of odour and music upon dressing change.

Vascular wounds may require frequent dressing changes over a long period of time, often involving pain, which may not be adequately controlled with conventional analgesia. Complementary analgesia may be beneficial as an adjunctive therapy. This pilot study presented eight patients with two odour therapies, lavender and lemon, two music therapies, relaxing and preferred music and a control condition, during vascular wound dressing changes. Although the therapies did not reduce the pain intensity during the dressing change there was a significant reduction in pain intensity for the lavender therapy and a reduction in pain intensity for the relaxing music therapy after the dressing change. This supports the use of these complementary therapies, which are inexpensive, easy to administer and have no known side effects, as adjunctive analgesia in this patient population. Earlier administration before dressing change may enhance these effects. Further research is required to ascertain why certain complementary therapies are more effective than others at relieving pain.

Aged↗