RECALL AND RECOGNITION MEMORY IN PATIENTS WITH FOCAL FRONTAL, TEMPORAL-LOBE AND DIENCEPHALIC LESIONS

Patients with frontal, temporal lobe, or diencephalic lesions were com pared with healthy controls on measures of recall and recognition memo ry for word lists. Exposure times were titrated to match recognition m emory scores 30 s after the end of word-list presentation as closely a s possible. Using this technique, we failed to find a disproportionate impairment in recall memory in either the frontal lobe lesion patient s or in the amnesic (temporal lobe and diencephalic) patients, compare d with healthy controls. Consistent with this finding, performance on these tasks showed highly significant correlations with anterograde me mory quotients (despite the titration procedure), but not with executi ve/frontal function tasks. On the other hand, the frontal lobe lesion group showed disproportionate benefit in the recall of semantically ca tegorised words, compared with unrelated words. This may indicate an i mpairment in retrieval or access, compared with the amnesic (temporal lobe and diencephalic) patients, and/or an inability to organise their learning of unrelated words spontaneously, compared with healthy cont rols. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.