An Experimental Study of the Functions of the Frontal Lobes in Man*

Bistable perception in normal aging: perceptual reversibility and its relation to cognition

“…Brain lesions studies (i.e., frontal-lobe craniotomy versus parietal craniotomy/healthy adults; Ricci and Blundo, 1990; Meenan and Miller, 1994; Yacorzynski and Davis, 1945) as well as imaging studies have implicated fronto-parietal networks in bistable perception (Britz, Landis, & Michel, 2009; Knapen, Brascamp, Pearson, van Ee, Blake, 2011; Rees and Lavie, 2001; Slotnick and Yantis, 2004; Sterzer and Kleinschmidt, 2007; Tong, Wong, Meng, and McKeef, 2002; Weilnhammer, Ludwig, Hesselmann, Sterzer, 2013), suggesting that attention-related brain areas support spontaneous perceptual alternations by sending top-down signals to guide activity in visual cortex towards one perceptual representation or the other (see Blake & Logothetis, 2002, Knapen, Brascamp, Pearson, van Ee, Blake, 2011; Leopold & Logothetis, 1999). …”

“…These behavioral studies together suggest that bistable perception is mediated by brain areas associated with the fronto-parietal attentional network, which is affected by normal aging (Aydin, Strang, & Manahilov, 2013; Heath and Orbach, 1963; Holt & Matson, 1976; McBain, Norton, Kim, and Chen, 2011; Norman, Norman, Pattison, Taylor and Goforth, 2007; Ukai, Ando, and Kuze, 2003; Yacorzynski and Davis, 1945; Windmann et al, 2006). Research has shown that structural and functional changes in these brain regions associated with normal aging also lead to cognitive deficits on tests of executive function including working memory (Gunning-Dixon, and Raz, 2003), processing speed and reasoning (Stebbins et al, 2001).…”

“…The first of these studies used the bistable Necker cube and found that only six elderly adults out of 31 eligible participants (ages 65–90) were able to understand the task and report reversals (Heath and Orbach, 1963). The investigators noted that the reversal rate for four out of the six participants (1, 2, 4, and 8 reversals while viewing the cube passively for two minutes) was comparable to that of younger patients (ages 23–51) with frontal-lobe damage (8 reversals, Yacorzynski and Davis, 1945). Holt and Matson (1976) also reported a significantly lower number of reversals in older adults (>65 years old) than in groups ranging in age from 10 to 55, with the highest number of reversals attained by the participants aged 25–45.…”

The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: An individual-differences perspective

“…For example, in field-dependence tasks, in which subjects must ignore some environmental cues and attend to others, patients with broad-spread frontal lobe damage are only sometimes impaired relative to patients with posterior cortical damage. Frontal patients appear to be impaired only when they must overcome the distracting effect of their own body orientation, but not when they must simply ignore irrelevant visual stimuli (Battersby, Krieger, Pollack, & Bender, 1953;Teuber, Battersby, & Bender, 1951;Teuber & Mishkin, 1954;Teuber & Weinstein, 1956; but see Yacosynski & Davies, 1945). Moreover, in the Eriksen and Eriksen (1974) flanker task, in which tobe-identified target letters are flanked by distractor letters, patients with heterogeneous PFC damage showed no more interference from the distractors than did normal controls (Lee, Wild, Hollnagel, & Grafman, 1999;Rafal et al, 1996).…”

Perceptual, cognitive, and personality rigidity in Parkinson's disease

“…Studies describing the role of the frontal lobes in bistable perception found that patients reported significantly fewer reversals when passively viewing a bistable figure when compared to a healthy control group (Yacorzynski & Davis, 1945) and compared to patients with posterior (parietal) lobe damage (Ricci & Blundo, 1990). McBain and colleagues (2010) reported that individuals with schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder with known frontal-lobe compromise, were unable to hold one particular face of the Necker cube compared to a matched control group.…”