Brain, Vol. 114A, No. 1, 245-261, 1991
© 1991 Oxford University Press
REVERSED LATERALIZATION OF COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS IN RIGHT HANDERS
EXCEPTIONS TO CLASSICAL APHASIOLOGY
Aphasia Program, Braintree Hospital, and the Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to: Dr Richard S. Fischer, Department of Neuropsychology, Braintree Hospital, 250 Pond Street, Braintree, MA 02184, USA
Most current and past research on the cerebral organization of cognitive functions has presupposed certain specialized hemisphere operations. At least for right handers, language and praxis are to be organized in the left hemisphere, while affective prosody, configurational spatial capacity, and global attention are lateralized in the right hemisphere. Deviations from these presuppositions, as in crossed aphasics and perhaps left handers, are generally considered to be ‘exceptions’ and either to disprove the rules or to be irrelevant to the rule. We report 4 very ‘exceptional’ cases, right handers with almost entirely reversed lateralization of functions. Analysis of the intrahemispheric relationships between functions suggests that there may be a specific neurobiology to the interrelationships between and among cognitive functions, handedness, and the intrahemisphere localization of the function.
Received September 19, 1989. Revised February 13, 1990. Accepted March 6, 1990.