title: Contributions of prefrontal cortex to recognition memory: electrophysiological and behavioral evidence.
abstract: To clarify the involvement of prefrontal cortex in episodic memory, behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures of recognition were examined in patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions. In controls, recognition accuracy and the ERP old-new effect declined with increasing retention intervals. Although frontal patients showed a higher false-alarm rate to new words, their hit rate to old words and ERP old-new effect were intact, suggesting that recognition processes were not fundamentally altered by prefrontal damage. The opposite behavioral pattern was observed in patients with hippocampal lesions: a normal false-alarm rate and a precipitous decline in hit rate at long lags. The intact ERP effect and the change in response bias during recognition suggest that frontal patients exhibited a deficit in strategic processing or postretrieval monitoring, in contrast to the more purely mnemonic deficit shown by hippocampal patients.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology and Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, USA. diane@ebire.org
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Swick
authors.forename: R T
authors.initials: RT
authors.lastname: Knight
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000647:Amnesia / Q000209:etiology; D001037:Aphasia / Q000145:classification / Q000209:etiology; D002536:Cerebral Arteries / Q000473:pathology; D002544:Cerebral Infarction / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000145:classification*; D008875:Middle Aged; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D013997:Time Factors; D014936:Word Association Tests