Biomedical subjects

Michele Lepore

Publications and source records attributed to Michele Lepore.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Multidirectional transpositions suggesting pathologic approach behavior after frontal stroke.

The authors report a patient with a right frontal stroke who, despite the ability to draw clocks accurately from memory, translocated numbers on the inferior half of the dial to the superior half when copying a clock. In further graphic and verbal clock reproduction tasks, transpositions were always directed toward the model but disappeared in a delayed copying task. These findings appear to reflect an intentional disorder characterized by pathologic approach behavior.

Apraxias↗

PubMed2004

Spatial transpositions across tasks and response modalities: exploring representational allochiria.

We describe a neglect patient who showed systematic transpositions of left-sided items onto the right side in clock drawing. When the patient had to write single hours on blank clock dials he again showed allochiria, while he copied single spatial locations without transpositions. The patient also showed a variable number of spatial transpositions on imaginal tasks with well known and novel material acquired through visual modality and on controlled constructional tasks, independently from response modality (verbal, graphic or motor). From this basis, we argued that spatial transpositions may derive from an impairment of the mental representation of space. Moreover, we speculated that such errors may result from cognitive conflict between different sources of information.

Aged↗

PubMed2003

On the different mechanisms of spatial transpositions: a case of representational allochiria in clock drawing.

In the present paper, we describe a neglect patient who showed allochiria in copying and drawing a clock from memory. To verify the mechanisms of allochiria in our patient, we designed an experimental investigation including two conditions: to write single hours and to copy their spatial locations, one at a time onto blank circles. The patient showed spatial transpositions in writing hours on blank dials, but did not show allochiria in the reproduction of spatial locations. These findings suggest that the patient could not represent in her mind appropriate spatial coordinates of each hour with respect to the whole clock face. These data are in contrast with findings reported in other patients and demonstrate that constructional allochiria associated with spatial neglect may derive from different causal mechanisms. Our experimental investigation has thus paved the way for a distinction between an "attentional" and a "representational" allochiria.

Aged↗