ABSTRACT

Goldstein’s Soldiers After World War II, Dr. Kurt Goldstein (1936, 1939) treated soldiers who experienced some type of brain injury, and he noticed symptoms such as disorganization, perseveration, hyperactivity, and problems with fi gure-ground focus. Goldstein’s work with fi gure-ground was replicated by Heinz Werner and Alfred Strauss (1941) in the 1930s and 40s in children with intellectual disabilities. These children, who were thought to have brain damage when presented with slides containing a fi gure embedded in a background of wavy lines, etc., projected at very brief exposure times, focused on the background rather than target fi gure. As a result, the term “Strauss Syndrome” was coined to describe children who were hyperactive and distractible. Extending this line of research, William Cruickshank used the fi gureground model to conduct investigations with samples of children who had cerebral palsy and normal intelligence (Dolphin & Cruickshank, 1951).