Autobiographical recollection and frontal damage.

A neuropsychological experiment on autobiographical retrieval of incidental past events, checked by means of a standardized enquiry, was carried out on a series of 16 patients with CT-assessed frontal lobe lesions. Of 16 patients, six were impaired on autobiographical retrieval. Moreover, eight were impaired on supraspan verbal learning. Impairment on both resulted in three patients, whereas in five there was no impairment on either test. Concordance between autobiographical and learning impairment was far from significant. Poor autobiographical retrieval correlated significantly with "executive" test performances and with the CT-verified bilaterality of the frontal damage. Poor learning of new information did not correlate significantly with "executive" performances, nor did it appear to be related to the hemispheric side or to the bilaterality of the frontal lesion. We propose that the relationship between the attentional system of retrieving from remote memory and of learning new information is qualitatively different.