Scherer and his associates have published two reports (11,12) dealing with the changes in a sample of schizophrenic patients following prefrontal lobotomy. The present paper reports the results of a similar experiment utilizing an independent sample.Earlier studies of the effect of prefrontal lobotomy on psychological test scores (1, 2, 4, 7, 9) have yielded conflicting results. Scherer et al. (12) suggested that part of this discrepancy might be due to differences in the length of the interval between pre-and posttesting. Other factors, cited from a review of the literature, which might lead to conflicting results included lack of control subjects, heterogeneity of the sample populations under study, variations in the type of operation, and failure to integrate test findings with clinical data. By controlling these factors in an approach which involved successive verification of hypotheses (12, pp. 2-5) Scherer et al. demonstrated presumably reliable changes in 73 out of a total of 118 test measures.The results of the original experiment appeared to support four generalized hypotheses which can be stated briefly as follows: (a)
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