Focal brain lesions and intelligence: A study with a new version of Raven's colored matrices

Abstract

Contrasting results have been obtained in previous investigations, which have used the standard version of Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices for studying the effects of localized brain lesion on visual-spatial intelligence. Some of these discrepancies might be due to the fact that specific factors, such as unilateral spatial neglect, could contribute to decreased performance obtained on Raven's test by patients with focal brain lesions. A new set of Colored Matrices, devised to minimize the influence of unilateral spatial neglect without changing the essential features of the original task, was therefore constructed. The test was administered to 76 normal controls, 74 right brain-damaged patients, 87 aphasics, and 61 nonaphasic left brain-damaged patients, in order to study the effect of laterality of lesions and of language impairment on Raven's scores. The results show that, if the influence of unilateral spatial neglect is minimized and Raven's scores are corrected in reference to age, educational level, and lesion size, then: no significant differences are observed between right and left brain-damaged patients; aphasics score worse than nonaphasic left brain-damaged patients; impairment is greater in patients with Wernicke's and Global aphasia (i.e., in patients with severe language comprehension disorders) than in patients classified as Broca's, Anomic, or Conduction aphasia; impairment is greater in patients with semantic-lexical discrimination errors than in patients free from semantic-lexical comprehension disorders.

Domain-specific cognitive recovery after first-ever stroke: A follow-up study of 111 cases

“…Second, abstract reasoning emerged as the best predictor of long-term language performance. In a similar vein, previous studies have shown a close association between abstract reasoning impairment and aphasia (De Renzi et al, 1966;Gainotti et al, 1986;Baldo et al, 2005). The majority of patients who were cognitively unimpaired immediately after the stroke retained the same level of cognitive performance at follow-up as healthy controls, suggesting that there is no evidence of a generalized insidious cognitive deterioration in this stroke population, at least not in the first six months after the stroke.…”

Cognitive Disorders in Acute Stroke: Prevalence and Clinical Determinants

“…Although both the left [19, 20] and right hemisphere [e.g. [21]] have been shown to be implicated in complex cognitive functioning such as abstract reasoning and executive functioning, an intact language comprehension is presumably crucial in order to display an unimpaired performance on tasks assessing these functions, as has been shown recently [22] and in some older studies [23, 24]. Taken together, the close relation between language and complex cognitive processes may explain the higher prevalence of these disorders in patients with left compared to right cortical stroke.…”

Poor Frequency Discrimination Probes Dyslexics with Particularly Impaired Working Memory

“…To test this possibility, we assessed our participants' performance on Raven's matrices [Raven et al, 1992], which, like Block Design, involves nonverbal reasoning. However, adequate performance of this task implicitly requires adequate verbal memory abilities, and individuals with severe acquired language and verbal memory impairments have difficulties with this task [Gainotti et al, 1986]. The intuition is simple.…”