title: Variability in the impairment of recognition memory in patients with frontal lobe lesions.
abstract: Fourteen patients with frontal lobe lesions and 14 normal subjects were tested on a recognition memory task that required discriminating between target words, new words that are synonyms of the targets and unrelated distractors. A deficit was found in 12 of the patients. Moreover, three different patterns of recognition impairment were identified: (I) poor memory for targets, (II) normal hits but increased false recognitions for both types of distractors, (III) normal hit rates, but increased false recognitions for synonyms only. Differences in terms of location of the damage and behavioral characteristics between these subgroups were examined. An encoding deficit was proposed to explain the performance of patients in subgroup I. The behavioral patterns of the patients in subgroups II and III could be interpreted as deficient post-retrieval verification processes and an inability to recollect item-specific information, respectively.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Psychopathology Unit, Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium. christine.bastin@ulg.ac.be
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bastin
authors.forename: Martial
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Van der Linden
authors.forename: Françoise
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lekeu
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Andrés
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Salmon
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000150:complications / Q000601:surgery; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D002532:Intracranial Aneurysm / Q000150:complications; D008297:Male; D016555:Matched-Pair Analysis; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000145:classification* / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology