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Right Hemisphere Brain Damage in Children

Departments of Neurosciences and Pediatrics, University of California, San Diego School of Medicine
La Jolla, CA

Adults with right hemisphere (RH) damage have a characteristic cognitive profile of impaired facial recognition and visual spatial skills, contralateral neglect, and aprosodia, with relatively intact propositional language. The adverse effects of childhood RH damage are more subtle and do not follow the adult pattern following RH injury.

This article reviews evidence that the RH is specialized early in life for certain cognitive functions, including comprehension of affective prosody and visual spatial analysis. Other cognitive functions such as facial recognition, language, and expressive prosody appear to have more bilateral representation during early development. There is also strong evidence for plasticity in the developing RH that allows reorganization to take place following focal injury. Such differences in neural networks during development may account for the good functional recovery in children with perinatal RH brain damage.