An investigation of body part as object (BPO) responses in normal and brain-damaged adults

A test of simple pantomime was administered to three groups of adults and comparisons were made across groups of the incidence of subjects who exhibited body part as object (BPO) responses and of the mean frequency of occurrence of BPO in each group. The three groups were left-hemisphere-damaged aphasics (N = 28), right-hemisphere-damaged (N = 24), and normal controls (N = 28). The results indicated no significant differences among groups on the BPO measures. Also, to test the strength of association between the frequency of occurrence of BPO and measures of limb apraxia and severity of aphasia for the left-hemisphere-damaged aphasic group, correlation coefficients were obtained. The correlations were low and nonsignificant. The results of this investigation do not support the common clinical assumption that the occurrence of BPO during the performance of simple pantomimes is pathognomic for left-hemisphere pathology or associated with limb apraxia.