Face memory impairments in patients with frontal lobe damage

Objective: To determine whether damage to prefrontal cortex is associated w ith face memory impairment. Background: Neurophysiologic and functional ima ging studies suggest that prefrontal cortex is a key component of a distrib uted neural network that mediates face recognition memory. However, there h ave been few attempts to examine the impact of frontal lobe damage on face memory performance. Methods: Patients with focal frontal lobe lesions and n ormal control subjects were administered two-alternative forced-choice and single-probe "yes/no" tests of recognition memory for novel faces. Retrogra de memory was assessed by using famous faces as stimuli. Results: Compared with control subjects, patients with frontal lobe lesions showed evidence o f marked anterograde and relatively mild retrograde face memory impairment. In addition, patients with right frontal lesions demonstrated increased su sceptibility to false recognition, consistent with the breakdown of strateg ic memory retrieval, monitoring, and decision functions. Conclusions: Prefr ontal cortex plays an important role in the executive control of face memor y encoding and retrieval. Left and right prefrontal regions seem to make di fferent contributions to recognition memory performance.