IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT CONCEPTUAL MEMORY FOLLOWING FRONTAL-LOBE DAMAGE

In two experiments, the performance of patients with frontal lobe lesi ons was examined on implicit and explicit tests of conceptual memory f or organized lists of words. Frontal patients exhibited normal levels of conceptual priming on implicit category production and free associa tion tests, but they exhibited impaired memory performance on explicit category-and associate-cued recall tests. The findings of normal perf ormance on implicit conceptual tests suggest that frontal patients do not have a basic deficit in semantic processing of individual items. I mpaired performance on explicit cued recall tests may be related to de ficits in the use of organizational encoding and strategic retrieval p rocesses.