Galveston Orientation and Amnesia Test: its utility in the determination of closed head injury in acute spinal cord injury patients.

The incidence of closed head injury (CHI) associated with acute spinal cord injury (SCI) has been estimated at 40% to 50%. Closed head injury can be defined as the presence of loss of consciousness (LOC) and/or posttraumatic amnesia (PTA). Consequently, one of the difficulties in establishing a diagnosis of CHI is determining the existence of PTA in those patients without documented LOC.

Experience-dependent recovery of cognitive functioning in young alcoholics.

Spontaneous recovery of some cognitive functioning in alcoholics after drinking has ceased has been convincingly demonstrated, but there have been no demonstrations of recovery that occurs primarily due to exposure of the alcoholic to specific environmental events. In the present study two groups of alcoholics began a 3-week series of tests sensitive to alcoholic cognitive dysfunction at different time lags after drinking ceased (1 week vs. at least 3 weeks).

Visual field differences between a fricative and a stop consonant.

Right-handed subjects who responded to a stop consonant letter, B, in a go-no go reaction time task evidenced a greater right visual field effect than did those who responded to a fricative consonant letter, C. The result was analogous to findings from auditory laterality studies and suggested a common type of left hemisphere specialization in the auditory and visual systems for information processing.