Journal

The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

[Vol.22 No.1 contents]
Japanese/English

Full Text of this Article
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ArticleTitle Imitation and constructive function in a neurological view
Language J
AuthorList Chiyoko Nagai
Affiliation Department of Neurology, Tokyo Women's Medical University
Publication Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 22 (1), 43-52, 2006
Received
Accepted
Abstract To investigate how brain damaged patients recognize the instruction "imitate it as you see", we gave two type imitation tasks for patients with parietal lesions and individuals with Williams syndrome. Tasks were as follows: (i) a narrowing-defined imitation task using only self body (e.g. finger shape imitation) (ii) an imitation task using tools (e.g. copying a figure, block design). Results showed that a patient with left parietal infarct made mirror-imaged errors or rotation errors only intask (i); patients with bilateral parietal lobe atrophy made a lot of errors within both two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, especially "closing-in" error in both tasks. Individuals with Williams syndrome revealed a curious error on copying task but no error on tracing in task (ii). Considering some reports that normal children also show the same errors on a similar task, we speculate that deficits to select and switch three coordinate axes (ego-centric, object-centred, and environment-centred) appropriately based on several constraints may cause variability of meaning of "as you see" for both patients and normal children.
Keywords imitation, reconstruction, parietal, Williams syndrome, coordinate axis

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