Frontal Lobe Functioning in Man: The Riddle Revisited

Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, Nov 1998

Forty-eight patients, each with a single frontal lobe lesion, were tested with a battery of 10 of the most widely used neuropsychological tests, comprising five traditional “frontal” tests and five others, for which that claim is not generally made. All correlations among the tests in the group were positive and significant. Moreover, the average correlation between each frontal test and the other tests in the frontal group was found to be higher than the average correlation of the same frontal test with the tests in the other group. A factor analysis of the scores on the five frontal tests yielded a single factor accounting for 53% of the variance. A factor analysis on the entire battery of tests (frontal plus nonfrontal) also yielded a strong general factor; although this accounted for a smaller portion (43%) of the shared variance, and one test (Verbal Span) failed to show a substantial loading on the factor. Neither the results of the present study nor the findings of other researchers argue for the abandonment of the concept of “executive” functioning, mediated by the functioning of the frontal lobes, in favor of a variant of fractionation.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://academic.oup.com/acn/article-pdf/13/8/663/7638/13-8-663.pdf

Frontal Lobe Functioning in Man: The Riddle Revisited

Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology Frontal Lobe Functioning in Man: The Riddle Revisited Sergio Della Sala 0 1 Colin Gray 0 1 Hans Spinnler 0 1 0 University of Aberdeen , UK 1 S. Paolo Hospital, University of Milan , Italy - Forty-eight patients, each with a single frontal lobe lesion, were tested with a battery of 10 of the most widely used neuropsychological tests, comprising five traditional “frontal” tests and five others, for which that claim is not generally made. All correlations among the tests in the group were positive and significant. Moreover, the average correlation between each frontal test and the other tests in the frontal group was found to be higher than the average correlation of the same frontal test with the tests in the other group. A factor analysis of the scores on the five frontal tests yielded a single factor accounting for 53% of the variance. A factor analysis on the entire battery of tests (frontal plus nonfrontal) also yielded a strong general factor; although this accounted for a smaller portion (43%) of the shared variance, and one test (Verbal Span) failed to show a substantial loading on the factor. Neither the results of the present study nor the findings of other researchers argue for the abandonment of the concept of “executive” functioning, mediated by the functioning of the frontal lobes, in favor of a variant of fractionation. © 1998 National Academy of Neuropsychology. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd After a century and a quarter of research, the function of the frontal regions of the brain continues to be the subject of speculation, and of controversy. In the 1960s, Teuber, summing up the state of knowledge at the time, wrote of “the riddle of frontal lobe function in man” (Teuber, 1964, p. 410) . Today, some 30 years later (and over 125 years after the publication of the puzzling case history of Phineas Gage [Harlow, 1868; see Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio 1994]) , the riddle has yet to be solved (review in Darling, Della Sala, Gray & Trivelli, in press). The so-called “riddle of the frontal lobes” is, in fact, not one puzzle but a whole set of related questions, some theoretical, others methodological. The former are concerned with the nature of frontal lobe functioning, the latter with its measurement. In recent years, there has been much consideration of whether there is essentially one kind of prefrontal lobe activity that is brought into play whenever any of a wide category of tasks is undertaken or, on the contrary, there are many different frontal functions, each of which is required only for a relatively narrow range of tasks. It is this issue with which the present paper is primarily concerned. The case histories of those who have sustained frontal damage are certainly perplexing. On the one hand, as with Harlow’s famous patient Phineas Gage (Harlow, 1868) , and with many similar cases described subsequently (e.g., Eslinger & Damasio, 1985) , the cognitive effects of frontal damage are often by no means immediately apparent. The patient may appear to function much as before, with little or no obvious mental deterioration; in fact, some frontal patients show high levels of psychometric intelligence (Brazzelli, Colombo, Della Sala, & Spinnler, 1994; Shallice & Burgess, 1991) . On the other hand, while a variety of other sequelae have been reported in frontal patients, each occurs in some patients but not in others, making it difficult to discern an underlying pattern. For example, some patients show personality change (Ackerly & Benton, 1948; Brickner, 1936; Penfield & Evans, 1935) , but others may not (Hebb & Penfield, 1940). There are, however, certain recurring themes. Although one patient may show an uncharacteristic apathy, another may present a contrasting picture of puerile practical joking and disinhibited social behaviour, and a third may display both of these contrasting patterns at different times (Blumer & Benson, 1975) , the occurrence of at least one of these presentations is so common in patients with damage to the frontal cortex that they are often referred to by clinicians as “frontal lobishness” (Benson, 1994) . In contrast with the frequency of the global patterns of frontal lobishness, the search for specific cognitive deficits peculiar to frontal lobe patients has generally been unrewarding. Following the discovery, in the 19th century, of Broca’s area, and of evidence to suggest that the frontal lobes are involved in the coordination of the motor movements involved in voluntary actions (Bianchi, 1895; Jastrowitz, 1888) , little else of interest was reported for several decades until, in the late 60s and 70s, Milner and her associates published some work suggesting that certain regions in the prefrontal lobes controlled specific functions (e.g., Jones-Gotman & Milner, 1977). Patients with frontal excisions involving the dorsolateral areas made more errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test t (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://academic.oup.com/acn/article-pdf/13/8/663/7638/13-8-663.pdf

Sala, Sergio Della, Gray, Colin, Spinnler, Hans, Trivelli, Cristina. Frontal Lobe Functioning in Man: The Riddle Revisited, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 1998, pp. 663-682, Volume 13, Issue 8, DOI: 10.1093/arclin/13.8.663