Factors Underlying Impairment of Visual Figure-Ground Discrimination and Sorting Tasks

This paper, though it deals with adult brain damaged patients, discusses a topic which is relative to the field of learning disabilities. Visual figure-ground discrimination and "aphasia-like " problems are present in so many children who suffer with a learning handicap that this study and its findings, will be of interest to many researchers.— C. C. E. Goldstein (1948) has advanced the view that apparently dissimilar tasks such as singling out a visual figure from a complex background, and isolating one criterion for sorting different items may be subserved by the same basic function. He regarded dis-ruption of this function as a typical feature of organic brain damage, in general, and of frontal lesions and aphasia, in particular. Subsequent experimental studies confirmed that brain-damaged patients were worse than the controls on both tasks, but there was some disagreement as to the specificity of the results and their implications for localization. The problem of the unity or multiplicity of factors underlying impairment on visual figure-ground discrimination and sorting tasks in brain-damaged patients is not yet resolved. My purpose is to present the results of 1This paper was presented at the Oxford meetin