Cognitive and motor deficits in selected unilateral brain-injured patients

16 right hemisphere and 16 left hemisphere, nonaphasic brain-injured stroke patients were compared with 16 matched normal controls on the verbal and visuospatial paired-associate tasks developed by Stark in 1961 as a partial replication to a more severely impaired population. Right brain-injured patients showed a significant visuospatial deficit and contralateral motor impairment; while left brain-injured patients, screened for aphasia, showed contralateral motor impairment but did not show impairment on the verbal task. Examination of the areas of infarct resulting from the cerebrovascular accident in the left-hemisphere patients suggested that the presence of a contralateral motor deficit without verbal impairment results from specific focal occlusions of branches of the middle cerebral artery in this selective group of patients.