Memory and skill acquisition in Parkinson's disease and frontal lobe dysfunction.

Animal experiments and human neuropsychological studies have provided evidence for the hypothesis that skill acquisition may be regulated by the basal ganglia. In the present studies, perceptual and cognitive skill acquisition as well as a number of explicit verbal memory functions were investigated in patients in early and more advanced stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) and in patients with frontal lobe lesions. Patients in more advanced stages of PD were impaired at cognitive skill acquisition as well as during recall conditions that involved active semantic organisation of the stimulus material.

Interactions between damaged brain hemisphere and mode of presentation on the recognition of faces and figures.

Visual recognition performance of right or left hemispheric damaged subjects and of a healthy control group was investigated under three modes of stimulus presentation: normal, sequential, or fragmentary. Stimuli were faces or not easily verbalizable so-called Perret-figures. A dissociation between side of brain damage and performance under sequential vs normal item presentation was found: similar to control subjects, left hemispheric damaged patients remembered previously seen stimuli better under normal presentation, while right brain damaged subjects were superior in performance under sequential compared to normal stimulus presentation.

A verbal long term memory deficit in frontal lobe damaged patients.

The retention performance for learned words was compared in two groups of cortically damaged patients: A group of 14 patients with uni- or bilateral damage to the frontal lobes (group F), and a group of 14 patients with postrolandic damage. The patients learned three lists of words each of which had to be reproduced after 15 min. and after 1 day: one list under free recall, one under cued recall, and one under a recognition condition.