FALSE RECOGNITION AND THE RIGHT FRONTAL-LOBE - A CASE-STUDY

We described a patient, BG, who exhibited a striking pattern of false recognition after an infarction of the right frontal lobe. Seven exper iments document the existence of the phenomenon, explore its character istics, and demonstrate how it can be eliminated. BG showed pathologic ally high false alarm rates when stimuli were visual words (experiment s 1 and 4), auditory words (experiment 2), environmental sounds (exper iment 3), pseudowords (experiment 5), and pictures (experiment 7). His false alarms were not merely attributable to the semantic or physical similarity of studied and non-studied items (experiments 4 and 5). Ho wever BG's false recognitions were virtually eliminated by presenting him with categorized stimuli and testing him with new stimuli from non -studied categories (experiments 6 and 7). The results suggest that BG 's false alarms may be attributable to an over-reliance on memory for general characteristics of the study episode, along with impaired memo ry for specific items. The damaged right frontal lobe mechanisms may n ormally support the monitoring and/or retrieval processes that are nec essary for item-specific recognition. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Scie nce Ltd.