Neurobehavioral theories of autism have hypothesized core deficits in sensory input or perception, basic attentional abilities or generalized attention to extrapersonal space, anterograde memory, auditory information processing, higher order memory abilities, conceptual reasoning abilities, executive function, control mechanisms of attention, and higher order abilities across domains. A neuropsychologic battery designed to investigate these hypotheses was administered to 33 rigorously diagnosed autistic individuals with IQ scores greater than 80, and 33 individually matched normal controls. Stepwise discriminant function was used to define the profile of neuropsychologic functioning across domains. The neuropsychologic profile in these autistic individuals was defined by impairments in skilled motor, complex memory, complex language, and reasoning domains, and by intact or superior performance in the attention, simple memory, simple language, and visual–spatial domains. This profile is not consistent with mental retardation or with a general deficit syndrome, but rather with a selective impairment in complex information processing that does not involve visual–spatial processing. This profile is not consistent with a single primary deficit, but with a multiple primary deficit model in which the deficit pattern within and across domains is reflective of the complexity of the information processing demands. This neuropsychologic profile is furthermore consistent with the neurophysiologic characterization of autism as a late information processing disorder with sparing of early information processing. (JINS, 1997, 3, 303–316)

Robust comparative and diagnostic norms for the elderly are provided for the Selective Reminding Test (Buschke, 1973). Correcting for factors such as age and education level are appropriate for comparative norms, which are intended for ranking individuals with respect to their age and education matched peers. However, because age and education are both risk factors for dementia, correcting for these factors decreases test sensitivity for detecting dementia. Age- and education-corrected Selective Reminding scores have a sensitivity for detecting dementia that is 28% lower than uncorrected scores. Using information about age in combination with memory scores provided optimal discrimination of dementia. It is concluded that statistically removing the contribution of dementia risk factors from memory test scores can severely decrease discriminative validity for detecting dementia in the elderly. (JINS, 1997, 3, 317–326.)

Twenty-four closed-head-injured (CHI) and 24 control participants studied two word lists under shallow (i.e., nonsemantic) and deep (i.e., semantic) encoding conditions. They were then tested on free recall, perceptual priming (i.e., perceptual partial word identification) and conceptual priming (i.e., category production) tasks. Previous findings have demonstrated that memory in CHI is characterized by inefficient conceptual processing of information. It was thus hypothesized that the CHI participants would perform more poorly than the control participants on the explicit and on the conceptual priming tasks. On these tasks the CHI group was expected to benefit to a lesser degree from prior deep encoding, as compared to controls. The groups were not expected to significantly differ from each other on the perceptual priming task. Prior deep encoding was not expected to improve the perceptual priming performance of either group. All findings were as predicted, with the exception that a significant effect was not found between groups for deep encoding in the conceptual priming task. The results are discussed (1) in terms of their theoretical contribution in further validating the dissociation between perceptual and conceptual priming; and (2) in terms of the contribution in differentiating between amnesic and CHI patients. Conceptual priming is preserved in amnesics but not in CHI patients. (JINS, 1997, 3, 327–336.)

Endogenous and exogenous shifts of attention were examined in nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). In the endogenous condition, an arrow was used to cue participants' attention to the possible location of an impending target, whereas in the exogenous condition, a brightened box was used to cue attention. Cues were either valid (i.e., the target appeared in the cued location) or invalid (i.e., the target appeared in a noncued location). The time between cue onset and target onset (stimulus onset asynchrony or SOA) was varied in each condition. The results indicated that PD patients were not differentially impaired in shifting attention at the shorter SOAs relative to normal controls. However, at longer SOAs, the PD patients demonstrated less of an effect from cueing than did the normal control participants. PD patients' differential effect from cueing was evident in both exogenous and endogenous conditions. These results suggest that PD patients may experience a rapid decay of attentional inhibition and do not support the notion that a decrement in processing resources underlies their attentional deficits. Moreover, these findings further support the notion that the basal ganglia may play an important role in attentional functions. (JINS, 1997, 3, 337–347.)

HIV+ subjects have shown impairment on tests of executive function including automatic attention and verbal tasks. Impairment of semantic priming in HIV patients would suggest a disruption of automatic semantic activation. We examined semantic priming in HIV+ individuals and HIV− control participants with no history of substance abuse, neurologic or psychiatric disorder unrelated to HIV. HIV+ participants were divided into cognitively normal and cognitively impaired subgroups on the basis of a neuropsychological battery of 15 tests. Participants were presented with English words and nonword letter strings and indicated if the stimulus was a word or nonword. The nonwords were orthographically and phonologically correct and were created by rearranging the letter sequence of words (“ulpit”). All words had an obvious antonym (“deep”); two-thirds were presented as sequential antonym pairs (“enter”–“exit”). There were no group differences in speed of response to nonwords, indicating no generalized reaction time deficit. While control and cognitively normal HIV+ participants showed an effect of priming on reaction time to correctly detected words, cognitively impaired HIV+ participants did not. The lack of semantic priming demonstrated by cognitively impaired HIV+ participants suggests that they have lessened activation of automatic semantic networks. (JINS, 1997, 3, 348–358.)

A recent theory of ADHD predicts a deficiency in sense of time in the disorder. Two studies were conducted to test this prediction, and to evaluate the effects of interval duration, distraction, and stimulant medication on the reproductions of temporal durations in children with ADHD. Study I: 12 ADHD children and 26 controls (ages 6–14 years) were tested using a time reproduction task in which subjects had to reproduce intervals of 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60 s. Four trials at each duration were presented with a distraction occurring on half of these trials. Control subjects were significantly more accurate than ADHD children at most durations and were unaffected by the distraction. ADHD children, in contrast, were significantly less accurate when distracted. Both groups became less accurate with increasing durations to be reproduced. Study II: Tested three doses of methylphenidate (MPH) and placebo on the time reproductions of the 12 ADHD children. ADHD children became less accurate with increasing durations and distraction was found to reduce accuracy at 36 s or less. No effects of MPH were evident. The results of these preliminary studies seem to support the prediction that sense of time is impaired in children with ADHD. The capacity to accurately reproduce time intervals in ADHD children does not seem to improve with administration of stimulant medication. (JINS, 1997, 3, 359–369.)

In 1985, Gualtieri and Hicks proposed the immunoreactive theory to explain the higher prevalence of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders in males. The theory claimed that male fetuses are more antigenic to mothers, resulting in increased immunologic attack on the developing central nervous system, and increased probability of atypical brain development. Individuals with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) provide a unique situation in which to investigate this theory. We evaluated the parent-reported prevalence of five developmental problems (stuttering, other speech problems, hyperactivity, attention deficit, and reading problems) in two groups: 154 individuals ages 8–20 years born to women with SLE, drawn from six cities, and 154 controls of comparable age and sex whose mothers did not have SLE. Controls were drawn from a comparison group ascertained from randomly selected schools in one of the cities. Questions about handedness, immune disorders, and pregnancy and birth complications were also evaluated. Children of SLE mothers were shown to have more evidence of developmental difficulties, immune related disorders, and nonrighthandedness. For developmental problems, these findings were most marked in male children of SLE mothers. These results suggest that maternal immunoreactivity, as represented by women with SLE, may present a special risk factor for subsequent learning difficulties in their children, particularly males. (JINS, 1997, 3, 370–376.)

Objective: To examine the relationship between antiphospholipid antibody positivity (expressed as the lupus anticoagulant) and cognitive dysfunction in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Methods: Cross-sectional comparisons of lupus anticoagulant (LA) positive (N = 39) and negative (N = 79) patients and controls (N = 35) on a cognitive test battery; 22 LA-positive and 53 LA-negative patients who had never experienced neuropsychiatric events (never-NP–SLE) were also compared separately. Results: LA-positive patients were 2 to 3 times more likely than were LA-negative patients to be designated as cognitively impaired. As a group, LA-positive patients, particularly those in the never-NP–SLE group, demonstrated lower performance primarily on tasks of verbal memory, cognitive flexibility, and psychomotor speed. Conclusions: LA positivity is associated with subclinical nervous system compromise, and a pattern of deficits compatible with subcortical involvement, possibly on the basis of ongoing LA-related microthrombotic events or vasculopathy. (JINS, 1997, 3, 377–386.)

Qualitative features of the neuropsychological test performance of individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) were examined in a population-based study. Qualitative error scores were derived from measures of verbal and figural memory, verbal fluency and confrontation naming for 38 patients with clinically diagnosed DAT, 236 normal elderly (NE) individuals, and 72 others who were questionably demented and at risk (AR) for DAT. Persons with DAT made a greater proportion of intrusion and perseverative errors, and more lexical and semantic naming errors, than the NE participants. These measures provided fair specificity but poor sensitivity for the diagnosis of DAT, and a logistic model based on these measures correctly classified 98% of the NE participants, but only 29% of the DAT participants. The AR participants demonstrated a pattern of errors that was highly similar to that of the DAT patients, and when their scores were subjected to the logistic model, 90% were classified as NE and 10% as DAT. These results indicate that specific error types that have been associated with DAT in self-referred or clinic-based samples also occur in the general population to a greater degree in individuals with DAT or questionable dementia than in NE individuals. Furthermore, these qualitative features may have some diagnostic usefulness in that their presence provides reasonable specificity for DAT or questionable dementia. (JINS, 1997, 3, 387–393.)

Introducing ice-water into the left ear of right-brain-damaged patients attenuates unilateral neglect symptoms. By examining EEG changes over each hemisphere during this procedure, we were able to test a hypothesis concerning the mechanism of cold-water calorics and the attention–arousal hypothesis of hemispatial neglect. We present a case study of an 83-year-old woman with a massive right-hemisphere CVA exhibiting severe hemispatial neglect. Caloric stimulation produced a leftward eye deviation to central position, and a temporary partial remission of neglect symptoms. Significant changes in EEG activation indicated a central mechanism associated with the regularization of eye gaze. Caloric stimulation also produced a significant interaction between EEG frequency band and hemisphere, indicating that while both hemispheres increased in cortical activation, the right hemisphere increase was significantly greater. This supports the activation–arousal hypothesis of neglect over the mutual inhibition model. (JINS, 1997, 3, 394–402.)