| dc.description.abstract | Introduction. Finger agnosia is a well-known consequence of particularly left inferior parietal lesions. Studies of finger agnosia have shown that patients are impaired on a range of tasks, assessing explicit identification of individual fingers, but also implicit knowledge concerning finger differentiation (Ettlinger, 1963; Kinsbourne & Warrington, 1962). It is established that several perceptual deficits can also be observed as a developmental disorder. This is also the case for developmental Gerstmann syndrome, of which finger agnosia is a constituent part (Kinsbourne & Warrington, 1963). However, finger agnosia as separate entity has received little attention in a healthy adult population. The current study aimed to assess possible deficits in finger recognition in healthy individuals.
Methodology. Various finger gnosis tasks that have previously been used to identify finger agnosia in neurological patients were applied (Kinsbourne & Warrington, 1962; Anema, et al., 2008). Moreover, performance on the finger identification tasks was related to body part identification and to left-right orientation, the latter being another component of Gerstmann syndrome. Sixty healthy adult participants were assessed.
Results. Cronbach‟s alpha showed sufficient internal consistency between various subtests of finger gnosis, allowing construction of an overall measure of finger gnosis. 5 individuals (8,3%) performed outside the normal range (≤2 SD) on this measure. Moreover, finger gnosis correlated significantly with left-right orientation and body part identification.
Conclusions. Finger gnosis problems in healthy adults may be more common than originally considered. It seems that these problems may be associated with reduced performance on left-right discrimination tasks. | |
