Verb Generation in Patients with Focal Frontal Lesions: A Neuropsychological Test of Neuroimaging Findings

What are the neural bases of semantic memory? Traditional beliefs that the temporal lobes subserve the retrieval of semantic knowledge, arising from lesion studies, have been recently called into question by functional neuroimaging studies finding correlations between semantic retrieval and activity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 1998-12, Vol.95 (26), p.15855-15860
Main Authors: Thompson-Schill, Sharon L., Swick, Diane, Farah, Martha J., D'Esposito, Mark, Kan, Irene P., Knight, Robert T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Aged
Biological Sciences
Brain
Brain Mapping
Brain Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging
Brain Neoplasms - pathology
Brain Neoplasms - psychology
Cerebral Infarction - diagnostic imaging
Cerebral Infarction - pathology
Cerebral Infarction - psychology
Female
Frontal Lobe - diagnostic imaging
Frontal Lobe - pathology
Frontal Lobe - physiopathology
Functional Laterality
Humans
Language
Lesions
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Medical imaging
Memory
Meningeal Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging
Meningeal Neoplasms - pathology
Meningeal Neoplasms - psychology
Meningioma - diagnostic imaging
Meningioma - pathology
Meningioma - psychology
Middle Aged
Neuroimaging
Neurology
Neuropsychological Tests
Neuropsychology
Nouns
Older adults
Prefrontal cortex
Psychology
Regression Analysis
Strokes
Tomography, X-Ray Computed
Verbal Behavior
Verbs
Vocabulary
Words
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Summary:What are the neural bases of semantic memory? Traditional beliefs that the temporal lobes subserve the retrieval of semantic knowledge, arising from lesion studies, have been recently called into question by functional neuroimaging studies finding correlations between semantic retrieval and activity in left prefrontal cortex. Has neuroimaging taught us something new about the neural bases of cognition that older methods could not reveal or has it merely identified brain activity that is correlated with but not causally related to the process of semantic retrieval? We examined the ability of patients with focal frontal lesions to perform a task commonly used in neuroimaging experiments, the generation of semantically appropriate action words for concrete nouns, and found evidence of the necessity of the left inferior frontal gyrus for certain components of the verb generation task. Notably, these components did not include semantic retrieval per se.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.95.26.15855