PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

R Kovner

Publications and source records attributed to R Kovner.

16 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

Neuropsychological testing in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a pilot study.

Diagnosing adult ADHD is frequently problematic because behavioral information from the patient's childhood, and multiple informants who can delineate the patient's current behavior, are often unavailable. This preliminary study was designed to explore whether objective neuropsychological testing may be a useful adjunct in the diagnosis of adult ADHD. Nineteen adults diagnosed with ADHD according to DSM-IV criteria, along with 10 controls, were assessed using a neuropsychological battery which comprised tests assessing linguistic, visual-spatial perceptual, academic, attentional and inhibitory control, mnestic and executive functions. Following preliminary analyses, designed to determine which variables best discriminated the groups, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were constructed to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the best measures both alone and in combination. Only three measures significantly (p < 0.01) distinguished the groups; Digits Backwards from the WAIS-R and two reaction time measures from a computerized task modeled after Luria's Competing Motor Programs. ROC curve analyses indicated that in combination these measures had greater than 90% accuracy for classifying ADHD and non-ADHD patients. While further research is necessary these preliminary findings suggest that neuropsychological testing may be a useful adjunct in the differential diagnosis of adult ADHD.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Access to information about famous individuals in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and normal adults were tested in two complementary recognition tasks. On each trial of the faces task, participants matched the photograph of a famous individual to one of four names. On each tial of the names task, participants matched the name of a famous individual to one of four photographs. The AD patients made enough consistent errors across the two tasks to suggest an impairment in the storage of information about the individuals. In addition, they made enough inconsistent errors to suggest a generalized retrieval deficit. The AD patients performed as well on the faces taslk as on the names task, providing no evidence of a specialized deficit in the retrieval of lexical information.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Frequency judgments for semantic categories in amnesics and normal controls.

Korsakoff's amnesics and normal controls read descriptions of five famous and five unknown individuals. Each individual was linked with five exemplars of one semantic category and three of another. Subjects decided which of the two relevant categories had been linked more frequently with each individual and made recognition judgments with respect to the exemplars. An analysis of the relationship between recognition and frequency judgment performance suggested that the normals but not the amnesics had used explicit memory for the exemplars in making their frequency judgments. An analysis of frequency judgment performance suggested that the judgments of the amnesics but not the normals reflected implicit memory for the associations between the individuals and the categories that had been used to describe them.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1992

Use of the Dementia Rating Scale as a test for neuropsychological dysfunction in HIV-positive i.v. drug abusers.

Intravenous drug abusers (IVDAs) represent an increasing proportion of the HIV epidemic. Forty-three IVDA's (22 HIV-negative, 21 HIV-positive) were studied using the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (DRS). All subjects had used intravenous heroin, but reported that they were drug-free at the time of testing. HIV-positive subjects were predominantly symptomatic and were dichotomized into AIDS and non-AIDS groups. All subjects with abnormal DRS scores were HIV-positive (57% of all HIV-positives). All HIV-negative subjects had normal DRS scores while 43% of the positive group obtained such scores. The DRS reliably identifies neuropsychological impairment, and may be a useful screening tool in this population.

AIDS Dementia Complex↗
PubMed1990

Acquisition of a new color name in amnesics and normal controls.

Six Korsakoffs amnesics, three mixed amnesics, and eight normal controls were taught the meaning of "bice", the word for a particular shade of blue-green. The conceptual interpretation that the Korsakoffs developed for "bice" differed in three respects from the one that the controls developed. (1) Although both Korsakoffs and controls applied the term more liberally to pens than to other objects, two of the Korsakoffs showed an extreme form of this tendency. (2) The Korsakoffs tended to generalize more broadly along the spectral dimension in using the term. (3) Whereas there was a positive relationship, in the data for the controls, between measures of syntactic and semantic awareness concerning "bice", there was no such relationship in the Korsakoffs data. It was concluded that the Korsakoffs had difficulty mastering the new word, and difficulty specifically in integrating their representation for the word with the rest of their lexical knowledge.

Amnesia↗
PubMed1989

Relation of personality and attentional factors to cognitive deficits in human immunodeficiency virus-infected subjects.

In view of the evidence that patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection experience reactive depression and anxiety, it is important to determine whether these factors might account for some of the cognitive deficiencies observed in this group, as is often the case in psychiatric populations. An extensive battery of cognitive, personality, and attention tests was administered to 26 patients who tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus. In this group were patients who demonstrated no symptoms, patients who had acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-related complex, and patients who had acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Pearson Product Moment correlations were computed between scores on the three types of measures. The results of this correlational study suggest that cognitive decline in patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus is independent of mood and attentional changes.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗
PubMed1988

Effects of instructional set on amnesic recognition memory performance.

Tests that tapped memory for spatial location, temporal order, frequency of occurrence, and category membership were administered to a group of alcoholic Korsakoff patients, a group of mixed amnesic patients with primarily temporal lobe pathology, and a group of normal subjects. The four tests were administered with incidental as well as intentional learning conditions. All groups performed better in the intentional than the incidental condition of the category recognition test. None of the groups performed better in the intentional than the incidental conditions on any of the other tests. The data were interpreted as implying that amnesic patients do not benefit from intentional learning conditions in tests of memory for contextual stimuli.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1985

Some amnesic patients can freely recall large amounts of information in new contexts.

A previously reported technique for promoting robust free recall in amnesic subjects (Ridiculously Imaged Stories) was further studied in two amnesic patients to determine if there is a limit to the amount of information that can be acquired, and if the novelty of the storyline is essential for its efficacy. Two different lists of words were taught to each subject embedded in either a ridiculous or a logical story. The subjects learned combined totals of 160 (S1) and 120 (S2) words with perfect free recall at intervals up to 7 weeks between last list exposure and recall. No differences were observed in rates of learning between the two types of stories. These results challenge the view that amnesic subjects are unable to freely recall large amounts of new information within a newly acquired context. A theoretical integration of the data is explored.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

A technique for promoting robust free recall in chronic organic amnesia.

A learning technique was developed for chronically amnesic subjects which linked word-list items in a novel manner utilizing ridiculously-imaged-stories (RIS). By the 8th week of once-weekly 45 minute training sessions with RIS the five amnesic subjects were able to freely recall an average of 14 items from a 20-item list after a 1-week interval, but showed minimal recall after the same interval of another 20-word list that had been concurrently learned in a cued, modified free-recall condition. The effective RIS technique producing this robust recall combines stimuli embedded in a novel-arousing context with high-imagery, storyline, cuing, and spaced repetition. The net effect of this technique is interpreted as providing artificial "chunks" that can be encoded and transferred relatively normally into long-term memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1981

A verbal semantic deficit in the alcoholic Korsakoff syndrome.

A test designed to assess the adequacy of knowledge about specific words, presumed to be well established in long-term storage, was administered to 5 alcoholic Korsakoff patients, 3 post-trauma amnesics, and 5 normal controls. The 400 question true/false test tapped knowledge of basic and obscure attributes and functions of 25 noun-concepts. The data indicate that traumatic amnesics made more total errors than Korsakoff amnesics, who in turn made more errors than normals. However, Korsakoffs made a greater proportion of errors on basic-knowledge items than the other groups. It is concluded that semantic organization is impaired in both amnesic groups, although differently. The post-trauma error pattern suggests a uni-factor deficit while the Korsakoff pattern suggests a multifactor deficit.

Adult↗