Voice and face recognition were tested in 21 left- and 9 right-hemisphere-damaged patients. Test materials were photographs and recordings of famous political and entertainment personalities. Pathological face recognition (prosopagnosia) and voice recognition (phonagnosia) were both significantly more prevalent in the right-hemisphere group. Only one instance of prosopagnosia and one of phonagn...

We report on a right-handed, deaf, life long signer who suffered a left posterior cerebral artery (PCA) stroke. The patient presented with right homonymous hemianopia, alexia and a severe sign comprehension deficit. Her production of sign language was, however, virtually normal. We suggest that her syndrome can be characterized as a case of 'sign blindness', a disconnection of the intact right ...

Previous studies have shown that the right hemisphere processes the visual details of objects and the emotionality of information. These two roles of the right hemisphere have not been examined concurrently. In the present study, the authors examined whether right hemisphere processing would lead to particularly good memory for the visual details of emotional stimuli. Participants viewed positi...

To what extent are the left and right visual hemifields spatially coded in the dorsal frontoparietal attention network? In many experiments with neglect patients, the left hemisphere shows a contralateral hemifield preference, whereas the right hemisphere represents both hemifields. This pattern of spatial coding is often used to explain the right-hemispheric dominance of lesions causing hemisp...

The unusual sensitivity and attraction to auditory stimuli in people with Williams syndrome (WS) has been hypothesized to be the consequence of atypical development of brain regions surrounding the Sylvian fissure. Planum temporale surface area, which is determined in part by Sylvian fissure patterning, was examined in 42 WS and 40 control participants to determine if anomalous Sylvian fissure ...

A number of studies investigating the brain characteristics of mathematically gifted youth indicate that they possess a unique functional organisation as compared to those of average math ability (O'Boyle, et al., 1995). Specifically, data from a variety of behavioural and psychophysiological experiments tend to suggest enhanced processing reliance on the right cerebral hemisphere and heightene...

Supratentorial arachnoidal cysts are usually associated with signs of fracture of the skull but hydrocephalus has not been reported in connexion with such cysts. In none of the 18 cases reviewed by Tiberin and Gruszkiewicz (1961) was hydrocephalus found. A 3-year-old child was recently seen with signs of hydrocephalus and a large arachnoidal cyst of the right cerebral hemisphere. The rarity of ...

Recent results challenge and refine the prevailing view of the way language is represented in the human brain. Syntactic knowledge and processing mechanisms that implement syntax in use are mapped onto neural tissue in experiments that harness both syntactic concepts and imaging technologies to the study of brain mechanisms in healthy and impaired populations. In the emerging picture, syntax is...

Studies of right hemisphere abilities have grown from focusing on visuospatial and facial recognition in the 1950s to covering a broad spectrum of human behavior. The emergence of better understanding of auditory specializations, affective/emotional functions, personal relevance, idiosyncratic lexical organization, and the various aspects of language use--communicative pragmatics--is briefly re...