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.

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