Right Hemisphere Damage Flashcards
RHD Symptom Overview
Cognitive: anosognosia, hemispatial neglect, attention/memory deficits, visual function deficits
Linguistic (usually minor)
Extralinguistic: pragmatics (nonverbal comm, inferences, humor, etc.), prosody, discourse and conversation
RHD Overview
Right hemisphere language capacities and deficits have been a focus of study for only the last 20 years.
Researchers are just beginning to develop explanatory models, predictors of recovery, and lesion localization information.
The RHD population is markedly HETEROGENOUS (which further complicates research efforts)
Cognitive deficits
anosognosia
other aspects of executive functioning (planning, organizing, reasoning, problem solving…)
Anosognosia
Complex family of related disorders
Impaired awareness of deficits or reduced insight into how those deficits affect daily function.
Attention deficits
Right hemisphere appears to play a particular role in attention.
Arousal and orienting toward a stimulus (may be hypoaroused)
Vigilance and sustained attention
Possibly selective, divided, alternating attention.
Hemispatial neglect
constellation of disorders of spatial exploration and attention that manifests primarily in a directional bias for perception, attention, and/or action.
Difficulty disengaging attention from ipsilesional space and orienting to, acknowledging, or responding to stimuli that are primarily in contralesional space.
Often co-occurs with anosognosia
Negative ramifications for recovery of independence.
Does neglect only occur in the visual modality?
No
What are the most common lesion sites for neglect?
parietal lobe
temporal lobe
Can it occur after a left brain stroke?
Yes
Doesn’t last as long
Not as severe
Not as common
Memory
Episodic memory difficulties
Can have trouble with recall tasks (story, word list, paired-associates) -difficulties have been attributed to attention problems.
Working memory
adults with RHD often demonstrate limitations in verbal working memory.
Visual perceptual/visual spatial
May produce drawings that are spatially incomplete/disorganized
Topographical difficulty (map reading, describing how to get from one place to another)
May be exacerbated by co-occurring neglect, field cuts.
What kind of participation restrictions might result from these cognitive difficulties?
Linguistic deficits
Pure linguistic deficits are NOT a major source of RHD communication impairment.
May make errors on expressive and receptive language tasks such as naming, verbal fluency, following commands, but usually mild in severity.
Visuospatial deficits, neglect and attention/working memory impairments have been cited as possible contaminating factors in some studies investigating linguistic disorders.
Deficits in reading
May see reading comprehension impairments primarily for information requiring integration and inference revision.
Reading requires encoding and processing of visuospatial information, so may see impairment (scanning a line of print, looking up and down page to find info…
Neglect dyslexia
Writing deficits
spatial agraphias
Emotional and nonverbal communication deficits
may have reduced ability to comprehend/express emotional content as conveyed in facial expression, discourse, body language, gesture
May show decreased nonverbal animation or extreme animation.
Literal interpretation in RHD
More common to choose related NONLITERAL interpretation than literal.
Metacognitive demands of common assessment may obscure retained abilities.
Visuoperceptual skills can confound performance
May do fine day to day with familiar expressions.
Sensitivity to listener’s needs/situation
possible problems with presupposition and theory of mind
May have difficulty taking the listener’s perspective
Humor
May have deficits appreciating humor
May tell crude/disinhibited jokes
Inferences
May have difficulty gleaning information that is not explicitly provided.
Clients with RHD appear to have more difficulties with inferencing when they have to revise their initial inference.
Prosody
Difficulty producing/interpreting pitch, loudness, duration cues.
Speech may be flat, monotonous or hypermelodic
May demonstrate difficulty interpreting prosody (e.g. judging intonation, emotional or syntactic markers)
Discourse production
Contrasting findings: diminished content, verbose, tangential, excessive detail, lack of coherence.
Discourse comprehension
particular difficulties when discourse contains ambiguous or conflicting elements that make multiple interpretations possible (sarcasm, irony, and figurative expressions)
Difficulty can also arise when discourse requires a revision of an initial inference
Most difficulty: attentional demands of task are high, working memory resources are low, inferred details.
Do well when: discourse info is coherent and consistent, inferences strongly supported, explicitly stated main concepts.
How might extralinguistic deficits result in participation restrictions?
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Extralinguistic deficits
emotional and nonverbal communication sensitivity to listeners needs humor inferences literality prosody
Interview questions for RHD
Does so and so: engage in casual conversation initiate communication verbally/nonverbally communicate when TV or radio is on understand "hints" from others stays on conversation topics
Comprehensive Eval of RHD includes:
discourse production and comprehension pragmatic behavior, conversation anosognosia/EF neglect attention, working memory possibly reading and writing
Published tests for RHD
The Burns Brief Inventory of Communication and Cognition
RICE-R: Rehab Institute of Chicago Evaluation of Communication Problems in RIght Hemisphere Dysfunction-REvised
Right Hemisphere Language Battery, 2nd Ed
Mini Inventory of Right Brain Injury
What test is not appropriate for RHD?
Ross Information Processing Assessment-2: serious psychometric problems