Naming of nouns and verbs in aphasia: preliminary results of a word retrieval task in a sentence context

Linguistic

Material Conditions of Collaborative Knowledge Construction: The Case of Monoplant

Monoplant is a prototype of an educational construction kit that provides teachers and secondary school students with hands-on experience on plant biology. We present the design rationale of Monoplant and report on its 3-week deployment in a high school classroom. The students (N = 14) used Monoplant to solve a photosynthesis assignment requiring them to compare the growth of two plants (one exposed to natural light and another to artificial green light). We used a qualitative approach to collect and analyze data, with observation, video recording, and interaction analysis as the main methods. The students worked in groups, and we video-recorded the verbal and nonverbal interactions of one group (N = 4). The two plants and Monoplant’s visualizations of the plants’ growth, together with the textbook, were the resources that the students used when solving the assignment. These material conditions provided an explorative design space for students’ collaborative learning, and many hypotheses were raised during the hands-on activity with materials and representations. Furthermore, we suggest an emergent practice based on our findings, in which teachers, and not only students, need maker spaces for creating material conditions for students’ domain-specific collaborative knowledge construction

Neglecting the left side of a city square but not the left side of its clock: prevalence and characteristics of representational neglect.

Representational neglect, which is characterized by the failure to report left-sided details of a mental image from memory, can occur after a right hemisphere lesion. In this study, we set out to verify the hypothesis that two distinct forms of representational neglect exist, one involving object representation and the other environmental representation. As representational neglect is considered rare, we also evaluated the prevalence and frequency of its association with perceptual neglect. We submitted a group of 96 unselected, consecutive, chronic, right brain-damaged patients to an extensive neuropsychological evaluation that included two representational neglect tests: the Familiar Square Description Test and the O'Clock Test. Representational neglect, as well as perceptual neglect, was present in about one-third of the sample. Most patients neglected the left side of imagined familiar squares but not the left side of imagined clocks. The present data show that representational neglect is not a rare disorder and also support the hypothesis that two different types of mental representations (i.e. topological and non-topological images) may be selectively damaged in representational neglect