Document Type

Research

Abstract

Much interest has been evidenced recently in right-left discrimination and finger localization tasks as techniques for demonstrating behavioral impairment in patients with known cerebral disease or injury. Defective performance by brain injured patients on both types of tasks has been described in numerous case reports (cf. 3) and has· been demonstrated in experimentally-produced cerebral dysfunction (1). In a systematic study of the incidence of defective performance in brain-injured and control patients, Benton and Cohen (2) found that the brain-injured patients, who did not suffer from serious general intellectual deficit, showed significant impairment in finger-localization performance when compared to the matched controls. There were, however, no differences in right-left discrimination performances between the two groups. These findings, while, of course, interesting and significant in their own right, raise some important questions which now require empirically derived answers. One such question, of considerable theoretical significance and practical importance, is whether the observed deficit in performance is specifically characteristic of brain-injured patients or whether it represents another instance of psychological deficits common to most psychopathological individuals (4). The present study attempts to answer this question in part by replicating the Benton and Cohen study with a group of adult schizophrenic patients.

Publication Date

1957

Journal Title

Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science

Volume

Issue

First Page

504

Last Page

507

Copyright

Language

File Format

application/pdf

Recommended Citation

Goodstein, Leonard D. (1957) "Right-Left Discrimination and Finger Localization in Schizophrenic Subjects," Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, 64(1), 504-507.
Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol64/iss1/56

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Right-Left Discrimination and Finger Localization in Schizophrenic Subjects

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