title: Cognitive risk-taking after frontal or temporal lobectomy--II. The synthesis of phonemic and semantic information.
abstract: Patients with unilateral cerebral excisions and control subjects performed two tasks in which target words had to be guessed on the basis of either phonemic or semantic partial-information clues. Each cumulatively provided clue was assigned successively lower point-value, these points being risked whenever the subject responded. Patients with frontal-lobe excisions chose to make a guess after seeing only one clue more often than did a combined group of subjects without frontal-lobe damage, but this guessing-score was also related to extent of right temporal-lobe removal. Patients with left temporal-lobe or left frontal-lobe lesions had difficulty solving the verbal clues, occasionally failing to recognize that a response generated in the context of one clue satisfied all the clues.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology; D011612:Psychosurgery; D011932:Reading; D012309:Risk-Taking; D012660:Semantics; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*