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Voluntary eye movements and following movements have been assessed on a 3 point scale in 33 cerebrovascular patients, examined immediately after the stroke and in 52 patients examined 6-9 days after the stroke. The two types of movements were found to be impaired to the same extent in the majority of patients, especially those with severe neurological deficits. The "agreement index" between them, though high, was significantly inferior to 1. This suggests that voluntary and following movements are subserved by adjacent, but not identical neuronal structures. The available neuro-radiological evidence points to the parieto-temporal cortex as the area critically involved in eye movement disorders.

Normal subjects and chronic alcoholics without clinical evidence of memory disorders have been compared on two tasks of verbal learning of a word list, one administered with the classical procedure and the other with the "selective reminding" technique developed by Bushke. Results showed that the selective reminding technique has the same discriminative power as the classical procedure: both brought out a remarkable learning deficit in chronic alcoholics. The selective reminding procedure is easier to administer and can distinguish between storage and retrieval deficits; it seems therefore preferable for diagnostic purposes. Practical criteria to distinguish a normal from pathologic performance on this test are suggested. Alcoholics were also inferior on Raven Progressive Matrices. The scope of the impairment produced by chronic alcohol consumption is wider than suggested by clinical observations and deserves careful assessment.

A review of the literature shows that long-lasting neurological complications of eclampsia are rare, but that, when present, they frequently involve visual function. Two patients are reported, whose symptomatology suggested damage to the posterior region of both cerebral hemispheres. The first patient showed a Balint's syndrome with complete inability to perceive more than one object at a time, erratic gaze movements and optic ataxia. After a year and half a marked improvement was observed. The second patient presented with severe of dyscalculia, spatial memory disorders, constructional apraxia and mild aphasia. She recovered completely in one year. This symptomatology might result from ischemic lesions in the watershed area between the territories of the middle and posterior cerebral arteries, the underlying mechanism being the compression of the posterior cerebral artery against the tentorium, caused by edema.