Spatial grouping activity in children with early cortical and subcortical lesions

Spatial construction skills were examined in 3- to 5-year-old children with prenatal or perinatal focal brain injury. In earlier work, a dissociation was reported between children with injury to the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, right-hemisphere injury resulting in significantly lower levels of performance. In the current paper, the effect of isolated unilateral subcortical injury was explored. Thirty-four children with early focal brain injury were tested in a task which required them to copy a series of simple block constructions. There were approximately equal numbers of children with right-hemisphere and left-hemisphere injury; within each of these groups approximately half of the children had injury involving only subcortical regions. Consistent with the earlier work, children with right-hemisphere injury performed significantly below children with left-hemisphere injury and the normal controls. Importantly, no differences were observed between the children with isolated subcortical injury and children with injury involving both cortical and subcortical brain areas.