title: Mediational factors underlying cognitive changes and laterality in affective illness.
abstract: Affective illness has been associated with lateralized right hemisphere deficits and global cognitive dysfunction. However, there has been very little exploration of information-processing strategies that may underlie cognitive changes in this population. Twenty euthymic, drug-free, bipolar patients and 20 controls were given a series of tasks to assess lateralized impairment of the cerebral hemispheres and sequential (analytic) versus simultaneous (gestalt) information-processing strategies. There were no differences between patients and controls in tests sensitive to right or left hemisphere impairment or in total errors on a face recognition task. However, patients tended to rely on individual facial features for recognition whereas controls were able to synthesize multiple elements of the faces. Moreover, on a task that required holistic synthesis of multiple stimulus elements (Street Gestalt Completion Test), patients made significantly more errors than controls. Implications for information-processing changes in bipolar affective illness are discussed.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011597:Psychomotor Performance