Memory performance on the California Verbal Learning Test-II: findings from patients with focal frontal lesions

Numerous studies have suggested that frontal cortex plays a strategic, rather than an absolute, role in memory performance. Typically, frontal patients are reported to have impaired recall but normal recognition memory. A recent meta-analysis, however, has questioned this conclusion. To further investigate the role of frontal cortex in long-term memory, patients with focal frontal lesions and age- and education-matched controls were tested on a new version of the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT-II). Frontal patients exhibited a number of deficits on this test, including overall poorer recall, an increased tendency to make intrusions, reduced semantic clustering, and impaired yes/no recognition performance. Further analysis of the error rates in the yes/no recognition task revealed that frontal patients were most likely to mistakenly endorse 2 types of distractors: semantically related words and words from an interference list. These findings are discussed with respect to the role of frontal dysfunction in false recollections and poor source memory, as well as the distinction between the roles of frontal and temporal cortex in long-term memory.