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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.74584 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Incisa della Rocchetta, Antonio |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001171004, proquestno: AAINN66544, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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