No description available.

The ability to generate different responses, and the ability to inhibit inappropriate behaviour, were explored in patients with unilateral cerebral excisions. Site-of-lesion effects were found to interact with the sex of the subject, the time of test-administration, and the nature of the response criteria. In Part I, the Thurstone Word Fluency Test revealed impairments two weeks postoperatively in patients with frontal, temporal, or central-area lesions. In men, removals from the left cerebral hemisphere caused greater deficits than removals from the right, but only left central-area excisions resulted in long-lasting impairments. Patients with left frontal-lobe removals produced few words on a sentence-completion fluency task, but on visual-image fluency, no patient-group was impaired. In Part II, an inability to inhibit impulsive actions on risk-taking tasks was seen after frontal lobectomy, as was a tendency to disregard the instructions on a word-fluency task. These results are consistent with the fact that patients with frontal-lobe lesions described themselves on a behavioural-trait questionnaire as less flexible and more impulsive than did control subjects.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1957. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-111).

In Part I of this thesis, recognition of natural scenes was tested in 72 patients with unilateral frontal- or temporal-lobe excisions and 32 normal control subjects (NC). The occurrence of a novel scene in the midst of a series of other scenes normally induces forgetting of the scene that had preceded the novel one. This phenomenon was not observed following right frontal- and right temporal-lobe lesions, and was only partially present after left temporal-lobe excisions that included the hippocampus (LTH). These brain regions were thus seen as part of a circuit that codes novel stimuli. In Part 2, recall of lists of words was examined in 77 patients and 12 normal control subjects. Both the left frontal-lobe (LF) and LTH groups recalled fewer words overall than the other groups; their performance was normal, however, when the words were pre-organized into categories and when category labels were supplied during test. In another experiment it was demonstrated that the LF group was impaired when category exemplars were provided together with the category labels, the LTH group being unaffected in this condition. It was concluded that left frontal-lobe lesions may affect retrieval mechanisms.

No description available.

Copy and recall drawings of the Rey Complex Figure obtained during the standard clinical testing of patients with well-localized epileptic foci before and after left frontal-, left temporal-, right temporal-lobe resection were re-scored blind as to lesion site using standard protocol (18 elements scored 0, 1/2, 1, or 2 based on whether they are drawn and placed correctly for a total out of 36). They were also scored for which, and how many, elements were missing, distorted, displaced, and/or repeated. Contrary to previous findings, no main effects of side or lobe or side-by-lobe interactions were found on copy and recall scores obtained either before or after surgery, and all patients' recall improved equally from pre-operative to follow-up testing. Furthermore, patients' lesion site could not be predicted on the basis of any single measure or across all measures of performance. While group differences had been found on the previously assigned scores, the between-group overlap was almost complete and the original scoring was not done blindly. These results suggest that, despite previous claims, the Rey Complex Figure, a widely-used measure of non-verbal memory, is not an effective tool for localizing neural disturbance in temporal- and frontal-lobe epilepsy patients.

No description available.