The frontal cortex and memory for temporal order

Patients with unilateral frontal- or temporal-lobe excisions and normal control subjects made relative-recency decisions about objects presented sequentially. Several objects within each series were presented in the context of actions to be performed using them, such as "squeeze the sponge", whereas others had only to be named. Both left and right frontal-lobe groups were impaired on order judgements for named items, but their performance was normal for action items. The results suggest that providing salient and distinctive items, involving meaningful actions and multimodal cues, helps compensate for deficits in memory for temporal information associated with frontal-lobe damage.