Evidence for intact semantic representations in patients with frontal lobe lesions

Patients with frontal lobe lesions and control participants were assessed on 2 tests of semantic knowledge. In the triadic comparison task, participants were shown all possible triplets of 12 animal names and judged which 2 of each triplet were most alike. In the ordered similarity task, participants rank ordered animals in terms of their similarity to a target animal. For both tasks, semantic structure--derived from multidimensional scaling techniques--revealed similar representations in patients with frontal lobe lesions and control participants. Additional pathfinder analyses also produced networks that did not differ between groups. These patients exhibited intact semantic knowledge despite deficits on tests of free recall and verbal fluency that involved the same semantic category and exemplars. Thus, intact representation of semantic knowledge in frontal patients stands in contrast to their marked deficits in strategic retrieval of semantic knowledge.