RECALL OF FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF SELF-GENERATED AND EXAMINER-PROVIDED WORDS AFTER FRONTAL OR TEMPORAL LOBECTOMY

Patients with unilateral excisions from the frontal or temporal lobe a nd normal control subjects were given two tasks requiring the recall o f the frequency of occurrence of words that differed in the number of times they occurred in study lists. In one task, subjects were require d to generate words in response to cues, whilst in the other they mere ly had to read responses that satisfied the cues. All subject groups g ave higher frequency estimates to words they had generated than to wor ds they had read. Across both tasks, the frontal-lobe groups (left mor e so than right) underestimated frequency of occurrence. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.