Performance of psychopaths on cognitive tasks related to frontal lobe function.

On the basis of their performance on several cognitive tasks, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the Necker Cube, and a sequential matching memory task (SMMT), E. E. Gorenstein (see record 1983-01261-001) concluded that psychopaths have specific deficits in cognitive processes associated with frontal-lobe functioning. However, it is argued that his diagnostic procedures were inadequate and his results confounded by group differences in age, education, general ability, and substance abuse. In the present study, the WCST, Necker Cube, and SMMT were administered to 46 male prison inmates divided into low-, medium-, and high-psychopathy groups on the basis of a 22-item checklist developed by the present author (see record 1982-02477-001). ANOVAs and ANCOVAs (with age, education, IQ, and substance use as covariates) failed to detect any group differences in task performance. Similar results were obtained when diagnoses were based on the Socialization scale of the California Psychological Inventory and the DSM-III criteria for antisocial personality disorder and when multiple criteria were used. Some general problems associated with attempts to explain psychopathy in terms of brain damage or dysfunction are discussed. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ideation in patients with unilateral or bilateral midline brain lesions.

Hypothesized that persons with left vs. right unilateral brain lesions differ in complicated ideational processes in 50 Ss with well localized lesions. On a multiple-discriminant analysis, 7 selected Rorschach variables differentiated the left, right, and midline-bilateral groups at the .0001 level. Interpretation of Discriminant I, ideation, yields a modus operandi of left-hemisphere Ss which is limited and constricted; of right-hemisphere Ss which is expansive and uncritically innovative. Discriminant II, uniqueness of pathology, indicates that left and right groups differ significantly and are significantly divergent, with the midline group undistinguished on this dimension. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word list learning and prediction of recall after frontal lobe lesions.

The effect of frontal lobe lesions on the accuracy of prediction of recall in a word list learning task was studied. Fifty-nine patients with a focal brain lesion and 21 non-brain-damaged control patients memorized a word list by selective reminding and predicted before each recall trial the number of words they would be able to recall. The patients with left frontal lesions, who were inferior to the patients with right frontal lesions and the control patients in word list recall, overpredicted their recall more than the other brain-damaged patients or the control patients, especially on the 1st trial. The patients with right frontal lesions were less accurate in the prediction of recall than the patients with right posterior lesions or the control patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rates of forgetting in organic amnesia following temporal lobe, diencephalic, or frontal lobe lesions.

Forgetting rates were examined in patients with diencephalic, temporal lobe, or frontal lesions. No significant differences were found in short-term forgetting of verbal and nonverbal material; in recognition memory for pictures, words, or designs over delays between 1 min and 20 or 30 min; or on a measure of explicit cued recall for words, calculated in terms of the process dissociation procedure. Significantly faster forgetting was found in the diencephalic and the temporal lobe groups in the free recall of pictures of objects, although there was no difference between these 2 groups. It is concluded that the major deficit in amnesic patients' memory processes is in the initial acquisition of information but that there is a subtler deficit in retention over specific delays, detectable only on measures of free recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparison of older people and patients with frontal lesions: Evidence from word list learning.

We examined the hypothesis that changes in memory performance of older normal participants are due to frontal lobe dysfunction by comparing three groups of normal individuals (young, middle-aged, and older) with three groups of patients who had documented lesions in specific frontal regions: unilateral right, unilateral left, and bilateral. All participants were given 4 successive learning trials on each of 3 lists of words: unrelated, related but presented in a pseudo-random order, and related and presented in a blocked format. We found significant correspondences in performance between the older normal participants and the (younger) frontal damaged groups. The qualitative nature of recall performance, particularly as measured by indices of organizational control processes, was similar between older normals and patients with frontal damage, particularly those with right frontal damage, but different from that normally exhibited by patients with focal limbic/memory dysfunction. These results add to the evidence that at least some of the decline in older people in tasks which measure executive or supervisory abilities is due to frontal system dysfunction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Frequency judgements of abstract designs by patients with diencephalic, temporal lobe or frontal lobe lesions

Patients with diencephalic, temporal lobe or frontal lobe lesions were compared with healthy controls on a frequency judgement task. The three patient groups were disproportionately impaired at estimating how often a series of abstract designs had been presented relative to controls. Diencephalic and temporal lobe patients did not differ from each other. It is argued that the results may reflect a 'core' memory deficit in the temporal lobe patients. The impairment in the frontal patients may reflect their difficulty in making an organised search in memory for multiple traces of an item, while the deficit shown by the diencephalic patients (particularly those with Korsakoff syndrome) may be due to the combined effects of a generally poor memory and superimposed frontal pathology.     

Letter and category fluency in patients with frontal lobe lesions.

This study examines the hypothesis that patients with frontal lobe lesions are impaired on tests of letter but not category fluency. This hypothesis was proposed by Moscovitch (1994), based on a series of cognitive studies with young, normal participants. A group of patients with lateral prefrontal lesions and age-matched controls were tested on 2 tests of verbal fluency, the FAS task and a category fluency task that used semantic categories as cues (e.g., animals). Patients with frontal lobe lesions generated fewer items than controls on both letter and category fluency. This effect did not interact with the type of fluency test, suggesting that the frontal lobes are more generally involved in verbal fluency. Moreover, this pattern of findings, along with previous results of impaired free recall and remote retrieval in this patient group, suggests that patients with frontal lobe lesions do not efficiently organize and develop retrieval strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recency discrimination deficits in frontal lobe patients.

Damage to the frontal lobes appears to cause a deficit in the temporal organization of memory. M. P. McAndrews and B. Milner (see record 1992-16996-001) found that S-performed tasks (SPTs), which involve the performance of actions with common objects, allowed frontal-lobe-damaged patients to circumvent this deficit and perform normally on recency judgments. The present investigation of the critical properties of SPTs compared the performance of frontal-lobe-damaged patients and healthy controls on recency judgments under 5 encoding conditions: SPT, naming, visual imagery, experimenter-performed tasks, and verbal elaboration. Patients' performance varied across encoding conditions, but controls' did not. Post hoc comparisons confirmed that patients performed significantly worse than controls across all encoding tasks except SPT. The findings help elucidate the nature of both SPTs and memory for temporal order. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inaccurate prediction of retrieval in a face matrix learning task after right frontal lobe lesions.

This study partly supports the hypothesis that frontal lobe lesions cause impairment of metamemory. Fifty-nine patients with a focal brain lesion and 21 non-brain-damaged patients memorized a 4?×?4 matrix of 16 faces in 6 consecutive trials and predicted the number of locations of faces they would be able to remember before each retrieval. When age-related impairment of learning was adjusted, the patients with right posterior lesions were inferior to the controls and to the patients with right frontal lesions on the total number of correctly placed faces. The patients with right frontal lesions were less accurate than the patients with right posterior lesions or the controls in the prediction of retrieval. The inaccuracy of retrieval prediction in the face test was associated with that in a word-list learning task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Virtual planning in patients with frontal lobe lesions

The VIrtual Planning Test (VIP) was developed to investigate the planning and organisational abilities of 25 patients with frontal lobe neurosurgical lesions, comparing their performance with 25 matched control subjects. The task, presented in the form of a board game, simulates planning and execution of a set of target activities that have to take place over a four day period, involving those that are either preparatory for a fictional "trip" abroad, or those that relate to the subject's current environment (context). The frontal lobe patients were impaired overall, tending to select inappropriate activities associated with their current context and showing greater impairment on subtasks requiring only one, rather than two, preparatory acts. The findings are discussed in terms of the validity of the VIP test in identifying executive functioning impairment and the degree to which the pattern of deficits are consistent with neuropsychological models of executive function.     

Effects of divided attention on temporal processing in patients with lesions of the cerebellum or frontal lobe.

Prefrontal cortex and cerebellum have both been implicated in temporal processing tasks although the exact contribution of each system remains unclear. To investigate this issue, control participants and patients with either prefrontal or cerebellar lesions were tested on temporal and nontemporal perceptual tasks under 2 levels of attentional load. Each trial involved a comparison between a standard tone and a subsequent comparison tone that varied in frequency, duration, or both. When participants had to make concurrent judgments on both dimensions, patients with frontal lobe lesions were significantly impaired on both tasks whereas the variability of cerebellar patients increased in the duration task only. This dissociation suggests that deficits on temporal processing tasks observed in frontal patients can be related to the attention demands of such tasks; cerebellar patients have a more specific problem related to timing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence for intact semantic representations in patients with frontal lobe lesions.

Patients with frontal lobe lesions and control participants were assessed on 2 tests of semantic knowledge. In the triadic comparison task, participants were shown all possible triplets of 12 animal names and judged which 2 of each triplet were most alike. In the ordered similarity task, participants rank ordered animals in terms of their similarity to a target animal. For both tasks, semantic structure-- derived from multidimensional scaling techniques-- revealed similar representations in patients with frontal lobe lesions and control participants. Additional pathfinder analyses also produced networks that did not differ between groups. These patients exhibited intact semantic knowledge despite deficits on tests of free recall and verbal fluency that involved the same semantic category and exemplars. Thus, intact representation of semantic knowledge in frontal patients stands in contrast to their marked deficits in strategic retrieval of semantic knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impaired retrieval from remote memory in patients with frontal lobe damage.

Patients with unilateral dorsolateral frontal lobe lesions and matched controls were given 2 tests of remote memory for public information, the Public Events Test and the Famous Faces Test. On both tests, the patients with frontal lobe lesions exhibited impaired recall for remote information. Recognition memory was relatively preserved. Provision of semantic and phonemic cues in the Famous Faces Test did not completely compensate for their recall deficit. These findings suggest that the remote memory impairment exhibited by frontal patients may be related to deficits in strategic search of memory. These deficits in retrieval from remote memory extend the array of memory deficits associated with damage to the frontal lobes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are word representations abstract or instance-based? Effects of spelling inconsistency in orthographic learning.

In Experiment 1, 62 10-year-old children studied printed pseudowords with semantic information. The items were later represented in a different format for reading, with half of the items spelled in the same way as before and half displayed in a new phonologically equivalent spelling. In a dictation test, the exposure to an alternative spelling substantially increased the number of errors that matched the alternative spelling, especially in good spellers. Orthographic learning predicted word identification when accuracy on orthographic choice for words was controlled. In Experiment 2, the effects on dictation responses of exposure to a misspelling versus the correct spelling, and the interactive effect of spelling ability, were confirmed relative to a no-exposure control in adults. The results support a single-lexicon view of reading and spelling and have implications for abstractionist and instance-based theories of orthographic representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategic processing and memory for temporal order in patients with frontal lobe lesions.

This study evaluated whether deficits in memory for temporal order in patients with frontal lobe lesions result from impaired automatic encoding of temporal information or are secondary to deficits in effortful processes, such as the use of organizational strategies and control of interference. Patients with lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and control participants were tested on temporal order reconstruction of semantically related and unrelated word lists learned under intentional or incidental conditions. Memory for temporal order in patients with frontal lobe lesions was sensitive to semantic relatedness but not to intention to learn. Tests of item free recall and recognition using similar encoding manipulations indicated that order performance in these patients was dissociable from item memory. Results indicate that automatic processing of temporal information is intact in patients with frontal lobe lesions but that strategic processing of this information is impaired. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relative effects of various word synthesis strategies on the phonics achievement of learning disabled youngsters.

Over a 2-day period, 105 children (84–216 mo old, WISC scores 67–231) were given lessons that provided direct instruction on a medial vowel sound, practice on monosyllabic words containing the sound, and specific transfer training on nonsense syllables. Word attack strategy was varied for the 5 treatment groups. Practice consisted of synthesis using initial bigrams and final consonants (co-g), initial consonants and final bigrams (c-og), a combination of initial and final bigram training, or letter-by-letter analysis and synthesis (c-o-g). The initial bigram strategy yielded significantly better performance on transfer words. This finding challenges popular approaches that emphasize rhyming patterns or letter-by-letter decoding. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An investigation of unilateral cerebral pathology with equated verbal and visual-spatial tasks.

Ss with left cerebral damage perform significantly different on certain tasks so as to be distinguishable from Ss with right cerebral damage. In this instance, verbal and visual-spatial paired associations were learned. The results indicated that control Ss (no known cerebral damage) showed no difference on either task, but patients with right cerebral damage (R) did significantly poorer on visual-spatial learning than verbal learning; patients with left cerebral damage (L) did just the reverse. Percent of accuracy of diagnosis of Rs as R, and Ls as L was marred by the factor of age. Measures of perseveration were less clearcut than error scores. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4JG82S. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory for famous people in patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy and excisions.

Memory for famous individuals was assessed by the use of a recognition test in which participants first made familiarity judgments, followed by forced-choice decisions to specific probes for identity. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) or excisions, 12 left hemisphere and 12 right hemisphere, and 18 control participants identified famous figures across 3 decades (1970s-1990s). Only patients with right TLE were impaired at familiarity judgments of faces; this deficit was evident only for the most recent decades. Both groups of patients, however, were impaired at naming famous faces and at providing semantic information about famous people. These findings suggest the integrity of temporal structures in both hemispheres is critical for retrieval of detailed semantic information about famous individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)