Neuropsychological investigations of art production and perception have the potential to offer critical insight into the biology of visual aesthetics. Thus far, however, investigations of art production in patients have been limited to anecdotal observations and investigations of art perception are non-existent. Progress in the field is hampered by the lack of an adequate instrument to provide basic quantification of artwork attributes. Motivated by the need to move neuropsychology of art beyond the fascinating anecdote, we present the Assessment of Art Attributes (AAA). The AAA is an instrument designed to assess six formal-perceptual and six conceptual-representational attributes using 24 paintings from the Western canon. Both artistically naïve and experienced participants were given the AAA. We found high degrees of agreement in the assessment of these attributes in both groups and few differences between the groups. We expect that the AAA's componential and quantitative approach will be useful in advancing neuropsychological studies as well as any investigations in which style and content of art works need to be quantified and compared.Since the time of Broca and Wernicke, the study of individuals with brain damage has provided unique insights into the biological basis of behavior. Thus, by the 207 Ó 2010, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.

Recent research on the neural integration of speech and gesture has examined either gesture in the context of concrete [iconic (IC) gestures] or abstract sentence content [metaphoric (MP) gestures]. However, there has not yet been a direct comparison of the processing of both gesture types. This study tested the theory that left posterior temporal and inferior frontal brain regions are each uniquely involved in the integration of IC and MP gestures. During fMRI-data acquisition, participants were shown videos of an actor performing IC and MP gestures and associated sentences. An isolated gesture (G) and isolated sentence condition (S) were included to separate unimodal from bimodal effects at the neural level. During IC conditions, we found increased activity in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus and its right hemispheric homologue. The same regions in addition to the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were activated during MP conditions in contrast to the isolated conditions (G&S). These findings support the hypothesis that there are distinct integration processes for IC and MP gestures. In line with recent claims of the semantic unification theory, there seems to be a division between perceptual-matching processes within the posterior temporal lobe and higher-order relational processes within the IFG.

The presence of sex disparity in living donor kidney transplantation (LDKT) remains controversial. To determine if women fall behind men in LDKT evaluation, we performed an intention to treat study of 2587 candidates listed for kidney transplant at a single transplant center over 7 years. We found that women and men kidney transplant candidates engaged an equivalent type and number of prospective living donors. However, sex-specific differences in sensitization history and histocompatibility reduced the rate of LDKT for women by 30%. Pregnancy-induced incompatibility with spouse donors was limiting given that spouses were among the individuals most likely to complete donation. Notably, participation in a kidney paired exchange program eliminated sex-based differences in LDKT. Collectively, these data suggest that pregnancy is a formidable biologic barrier for women and contributes uniquely to sex disparity in LDKT. Targeted efforts to improve transplant center participation in paired kidney exchanges may increase sex equity in LDKT.

Schemas are abstract nonverbal representations that parsimoniously depict spatial relations. Despite their ubiquitous use in maps and diagrams, little is known about their neural instantiation. We sought to determine the extent to which schematic representations are neurally distinguished from language on the one hand, and from rich perceptual representations on the other. In patients with either left hemisphere damage or right hemisphere damage, a battery of matching tasks depicting categorical spatial relations was used to probe for the comprehension of basic spatial concepts across distinct representational formats (words, pictures, and schemas). Left hemisphere patients underperformed right hemisphere patients across all tasks. However, focused residual analyses using VLSM (voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping) suggest that (1) left hemisphere deficits in the representation of categorical spatial relations are difficult to distinguish from deficits in naming these relations and (2) the right hemisphere plays a special role in extracting schematic representations from richly textured pictures.

Neuroimaging studies have found that sensorimotor systems are engaged when participants observe actions or comprehend action language. However, most of these studies have asked the binary question of whether action concepts are embodied or not, rather than whether sensory and motor areas of the brain contain graded amounts of information during putative action simulations. To address this question, we used repetition suppression (RS) functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine if functionally-localized motor movement and visual motion regions-of-interest (ROI) and two anatomical ROIs (inferior frontal gyrus, IFG; left posterior middle temporal gyrus, pMTG) were sensitive to changes in the exemplar (e.g., two different people “kicking”) or representational format (e.g., photograph or schematic drawing of someone “kicking”) within pairs of action images. We also investigated whether concrete versus more symbolic depictions of actions (i.e., photographs or schematic drawings) yielded different patterns of activation throughout the brain. We found that during a conceptual task, sensory and motor systems represent actions at different levels of specificity. While the visual motion ROI did not exhibit RS to different exemplars of the same action or to the same action depicted by different formats, the motor movement ROI did. These effects are consistent with “person-specific” action simulations: if the motor system is recruited for action understanding, it does so by activating one's own motor program for an action. We also observed significant repetition enhancement within the IFG ROI to different exemplars or formats of the same action, a result that may indicate additional cognitive processing on these trials. Finally, we found that the recruitment of posterior brain regions by action concepts depends on the format of the input: left lateral occipital cortex and right supramarginal gyrus responded more strongly to symbolic depictions of actions than concrete ones.