Mental Representation of Knowledge Following Frontal-Lobe Lesion: Dissociations on Tasks Using Scripts

Abstract

Twenty-three frontal-brain-damaged subjects, 10 posterior-brain-damaged subjects and 10 normal controls were compared on script tasks. They were first asked to re-establish the sequential and hierarchical structure of 2 script actions, and then, they were asked to order 2 new scripts which contained aberrant items. Impairments in script information processing were observed only in frontal patients. Of the 23 frontal patient tested 8 made errors in ordering actions, in choosing scenes and in making estimates of action importance in the first task, and they rejected the aberrant elements in the second task. Eleven frontal subjects performed as well as the control subjects in the first task, but used the irrelevant items. The last 4 frontal patients performed as well as the control subjects in both tasks. These results support a possible fractionation of the frontal lobe syndrome.

Contribution to the evaluation of language disturbances in subcortical lesions: a piloty study

“…Ordination errors in our patients (M = 11; SD = 10.5) were much more frequent than those found in Allain's group of 23 patients with frontal cortical lesions (M = 2.4; SD = 3.4). The number of intrusion errors, however, was lower in our group (M = 0.5; SD = 1) when compared to the same Allain's frontal patients (M = 3.3; SD = 2.7) 18 . Lesions in different parts of the frontal lobe produce different combinations of neuropsychological symptoms, especially when comparing the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral portions 31 , which is compatible with the existence of multiple functional executive systems 32 .…”

“…Lesions in different parts of the frontal lobe produce different combinations of neuropsychological symptoms, especially when comparing the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral portions 31 , which is compatible with the existence of multiple functional executive systems 32 . For Allain 18 , the ability of performing a sequential ordination and that of eliminating irrelevant elements can represent two distinct executive processes accomplished by the frontal region.…”

“…Frontal scripts: Frontal lesions impair the subject's ability to integrate sequential information and to organize them temporally; moreover, they interfere with the capacity of recognizing and eliminating distractors and elements that are irrelevant to the main action 18,28 . Hypotheses to explain this fact vary: frontal lesions might weaken the asso- ciations between elements within the working memory (the task of maintaining these associations is a pre-frontal attribution) 29 .…”

“…A frontal scripts test, translated to Portuguese from the original publication of Allain 18 was applied in 10 patients. This evaluation aims to investigate the ability of recovering information about familiar action sequences presumed to be sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction.…”

Event perception: A mind-brain perspective.

“…When the participants were asked to place the events in a script into the correct temporal order, all but one of the prefrontal patients made errors, whereas the other groups performed without error. Other studies have found that patients with prefrontal lesions are less able than controls to identify violations of normal sequential structure in scripts and to identify events that are not part of a script (Sirigu, et al, 1996;Allain, Le Gall, Etcharry-Bouyx, Aubin, & Emile, 1999).…”