[Recognition of familiar handwriting after left hemisphere and right hemisphere brain damage]

The recognition of handwriting is a specific achievement of the brain which need not be connected to understanding the written text itself. The goal of this study was to determine how this ability is impaired in patients with left- or right-sided lesions. Seventeen aphasic patients with lesions in the left hemisphere, 16 patients with lesions in the right hemisphere, and 15 normal controls (without CNS illness or damage) were investigated. They were asked to recognize the handwriting of a person well-known to them among a sample of ten different handwritten texts. The aphasic patients were able to recognize the handwriting of the familiar person either immediately or after some delay in 96%, the non-aphasic patients in only 44%, and the healthy controls in 100% of the cases. Results indicate that the recognition of handwriting represents a specific achievement which is independent of other verbal and lexical tasks. It is a task which involves the recognition of figural, geometric spatial patterns and, thus, an achievement of the non-dominant hemisphere.