Neuropsychology Central

[zeospeed]

neuropsychological testing can be used to see if a patient had unilateral or bilateral temporal lobe involvement.

But what tests would you use and what pattern of performance on these tests would you expect to find with (a) unilateral and (b) bilateral damage?

Thanks

[Paendrag]

The temporal lobes are big and do lots of things. There are lateralized functions, and generally lateralized functions (e.g., face recognition). When looking for unilateral indicators, one must remember that not everyone is created equal (handedness is important to assess). Memory is one way to look at laterality (e.g., visual vs verbal memory). Also speech vs prosody comprehension is important to look at (i.e., receptive aphasia vs receptive aprosodia). Naming, anosognosia, olfaction, hearing sensitivities (extinction), etc. . . are all potentially areas that might point to a lateralized deficit. Convergent validity is something you'll want to consider (i.e., double dissociation, Teuber, 1951).