Dr. Alain Ptito received his B.A. in Psychology from McGill University in 1975. He obtained his M.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. in Neuropsychology in 1986 from the Université de Montréal. He has been a staff neuropsychologist in the Cognitive Neuroscience unit at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital since 1983. Dr. Ptito is Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and he has been lecturer at Concordia University, Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Trois-Rivieres.
Dr. Ptito is involved in the neuropsychological assessment of seizure patients (adults and children), including preoperative intracarotid sodium amobarbital procedures for the lateralization of speech functions and memory. Other patient populations he works with are those exposed to various toxic agents as well as those with neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Dr. Ptito is also a medico-legal expert for head trauma cases and he has been developing a procedure using Positron Emission Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Neuropsychological data to diagnose the presence of cerebral injury in cases of mild head trauma.
Dr. Ptito is being funded by NSERC and FCAR to investigate residual vision in the blind field of patients who have undergone removal of a cerebral hemisphere for the treatment of epilepsy. He is also interested in identifying the mechanisms underlying local and global stereopsis as well as target localization in patients with unilateral brain lesions. Other research projects he has been involved in are the cognitive effects of bypass heart surgery, the cognitive sequelae of anticonvulsant therapy during pregnancy on school-age offspring and REM sleep dream recall after hemispherectomy.
Wessinger, CM, Fendrich, R, Ptito, A, Villemure, JG & Gazzaniga, MS (1996) Residual vision with awareness in the field controlateral to a partial or complete functional hemispherectomy. Neuropsychologia, 34 (11), 1129-1137. Ptito, A, Lepore, F, Ptito, M and Lassonde, M (1991) Target detection and movement discrimination in the blind field of hemispherectomized patients. Brain, 114, 497-512. Ptito, A, Zatorre, RJ, Petrides, M, Alivisatos, B, Frey, S and Evans, A (1993) Localization and lateralization of stereoscopic processing in the human brain. Neuroreport, 4, 1155-1158. Ptito, A, Crane, J, Leonard, G, Amsel, R and Caramanos, Z (1995) Visual-spatial localization by patients with frontal lobe lesionsinvading or sparing area 46. Neuroreport, 6 (13), 45-48. Ptito, M, Herbin, M, Boire, D and Ptito, M (1996). Neural Bases of residual vision in hemicorticectomized monkeys. Progress in Brain Research, 116, 381-400.
