Variability in the Impairment of Recognition Memory in Patients with Frontal Lobe Lesions

• Published in: Cortex Vol. 42; no. 7; pp. 983 - 994
• Main Authors: Bastin, Christine, Linden, Martial Van der, Lekeu, Françoise, Andrés, Pilar, Salmon, Eric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Italy Elsevier Srl 01.10.2006
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Brain; Brain Damage; Brain Damage, Chronic - etiology; Brain Damage, Chronic - physiopathology; Brain Neoplasms - complications; Brain Neoplasms - surgery; episodic memory; false recognition; Female; Frontal Lobe - physiology; Frontal Lobe - physiopathology; frontal lobes; Humans; Intracranial Aneurysm - complications; Language Pathology; Lexical Access; Male; Matched-Pair Analysis; Memory Disorders - classification; Memory Disorders - diagnosis; Memory Disorders - etiology; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Reaction Time - physiology; Recognition (Psychology) - physiology; recognition processes; Reference Values; Synonyms; Verbal Behavior - physiology; Word Recognition; episodic memory; recognition processes; false recognition; frontal lobes
• ISSN: 0010-9452; 1973-8102
• DOI: 10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70204-1

Fourteen patients with frontal lobe lesions and 14 normal subjects were tested on a recognition memory task that required discriminating between target words, new words that are synonyms of the targets and unrelated distractors. A deficit was found in 12 of the patients. Moreover, three different patterns of recognition impairment were identified: (I) poor memory for targets, (II) normal hits but increased false recognitions for both types of distractors, (III) normal hit rates, but increased false recognitions for synonyms only. Differences in terms of location of the damage and behavioral characteristics between these subgroups were examined. An encoding deficit was proposed to explain the performance of patients in subgroup I. The behavioral patterns of the patients in subgroups II and III could be interpreted as deficient post- retrieval verification processes and an inability to recollect item-specific information, respectively.