The role of prefrontal regions in the Stroop task

The Stroop is a classical paradigm that presumably involves the inhibition of automatic responses and is frequently used to assess the frontal lobe functions. We investigated the effect of discrete prefrontal lesions in a Stroop task. A sample of 32 patients with frontal lesions were matched with normal controls by sex, age and years of education. Significant differences between patients and controls were found for errors but not for reaction time. Regression analysis showed that the region most related to errors was the right prefrontal lateral cortex. Left lobectomies did not impair the Stroop performance. Our results favour the role of the right prefrontal cortex in sustained attention, and disagree with the conception of the left prefrontal cortex having a role in the inhibition of verbal automatic responses.