Ventrolateral and dorsomedial frontal cortex lesions impair mnemonic context retrieval.

The prefrontal cortex appears to contribute to the mnemonic retrieval of the context within which stimuli are experienced, but only under certain conditions that remain to be clarified. Patients with lesions to the frontal cortex, the temporal lobe and neurologically intact individuals were tested for context memory retrieval when verbal stimuli (words) had been experienced across multiple (unstable context condition) or unique (stable context condition) contexts; basic recognition memory of these words-in-contexts was also tested. Patients with lesions to the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) were impaired on context retrieval only when the words had been seen in multiple contexts, demonstrating that this prefrontal region is critical for active retrieval processing necessary to disambiguate memory items embedded across multiple contexts.

Utilization behavior after lesions restricted to the frontal cortex.

Utilization behavior, which refers to the tendency of patients to use objects presented to them out of context and in the absence of instructions to use them, has been ascribed to dysfunction of the frontal cortex. However, careful examination of the reports of patients presenting utilization behavior shows that these patients had sustained widespread cerebral lesions extending beyond the frontal cortex and often involving massive subcortical damage. The present study examined whether utilization behavior can be observed in patients with lesions restricted to the prefrontal cortex and no more than the immediately subjacent white matter.

Impairment only on the fluency subtest of the Frontal Assessment Battery after prefrontal lesions.

The Frontal Assessment Battery is a set of six subtests that is used widely to assess frontal cortical executive dysfunction. Performance on the Frontal Assessment Battery has been shown to be sensitive to various neurodegenerative diseases, but it has never been shown to be sensitive to damage restricted to the frontal cortex. Thus, despite its wide use, it has never been validated on an appropriate population of patients with frontal lesions.

Cross-modal interactions in the experience of musical performances: physiological correlates.

This experiment was conducted to investigate cross-modal interactions in the emotional experience of music listeners. Previous research showed that visual information present in a musical performance is rich in expressive content, and moderates the subjective emotional experience of a participant listening and/or observing musical stimuli [Vines, B. W.