Directed attention after unilateral frontal excisions in humans

We investigated the ability of patients with frontal-lobe lesions to benefi t from advance information in a simple reaction-time task. The task involve d pressing a button in response to the appearance of a peripheral target (v isual angle of 11.5 degrees). A cue, presented in the centre of the screen, preceded the target onset by either a short (average 500 ms) or a long (av erage 3000 ms) interval. In half of the trials, the cue was an arrow indica ting the location, in the left or right hemifield, of the upcoming target; in the other half, the cue was an uninformative plus sign. In addition to p atients with unilateral excisions of frontal cortex, we tested patients wit h anterior temporal-lobe excisions and normal controls. The frontal-lobe gr oup was mildly impaired with respect to the temporal-lobe group in using ad vance spatial cues to speed response to the visual target. While the size o f the cueing effect changed across the range of cue-target intervals tested , there was no variation across intervals in the size of the impairment exh ibited by the frontal-lobe group. The site and the volume of the lesions we re determined on the basis of magnetic resonance image (MRI) scans in 10 of the 17 patients in the frontal group. There was no correlation between les ion volume and benefit score in these patients. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science L td. All rights reserved.