False recognition after frontal lobe damage: The role of encoding factors

This paper reports a series of experiments on patient JB, a man with memory difficulties following damage to the left frontal lobe. The primary characteristic of JB's recognition memory impairment is a high level of false recognition together with a normal hit rate. The hypothesis that JB's false recognition reflects an over-reliance on familiarity is considered, but discounted on the basis that the false alarm rate is not affected by increasing the similarity between distracters and targets, and remains high when nonword stimuli are used. It is suggested, instead, that JB relies on a poorly focused memory description, which lacks item-specific detail but contains more general, low-level properties of the target items-these properties being held by many distracter items as well. This deficit is considered to arise because of damage to frontally mediated control processes involved in the selection of elements for memory encoding. An encoding deficit is supported by the fact that JB's false recognition is significantly reduced by orienting instructions, and is eliminated when his remote memory is subjected to recognition testing. In contrast, it is shown that manipulations at the level of retrieval (e.g. restricting the number of "old" responses) have little effect on his false recognition.

[1]  F. Craik,et al.  Depth of processing and the retention of words , 1975 .

[2]  H. Loess,et al.  Short-term memory and item similarity , 1968 .

[3]  L. Reder,et al.  Implicit Memory, Explicit Memory, and False Recollection: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective , 1996 .

[4]  Daniel L. Schacter,et al.  False recognition after a right frontal lobe infarction: Memory for general and specific information , 1997, Neuropsychologia.

[5]  Suparna Rajaram,et al.  Remembering and knowing: Two means of access to the personal past , 1993, Memory & cognition.

[6]  A. Parkin.  The neuropsychology of false memory , 1997 .

[7]  Alan J. Parkin,et al.  Neuropsychology of the Amnesic Syndrome , 1993 .

[8]  Further Characterization of the Executive Memory Impairment Following Frontal Lobe Lesions , 1994, Brain and Cognition.

[9]  Mary Ann Foley,et al.  Cognitive operations and decision bias in reality monitoring , 1981 .

[10]  V. Reyna,et al.  When Things That Were Never Experienced Are Easier To “Remember” Than Things That Were , 1998 .

[11]  Tim Shallice,et al.  The Involvement of the Frontal Lobes in Cognitive Estimation , 1978, Cortex.

[12]  James L. McClelland.  Constructive memory and memory distortions: A parallel-distributed processing approach. , 1995 .

[13]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Brain regions associated with acquisition and retrieval of verbal episodic memory , 1994, Nature.

[14]  A. Baddeley.  Exploring the Central Executive , 1996 .

[15]  Delos D. Wickens,et al.  Encoding Categories of Words: An Empirical Approach to Meaning. , 1970 .

[16]  Alan A. Wilson,et al.  Neuroanatomical correlates of encoding in episodic memory: levels of processing effect. , 1994, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  A J Parkin,et al.  The central executive does not exist , 1998, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

[18]  W. Whitten,et al.  Bidirectional synonym ratings of 464 noun pairs , 1979 .

[19]  T Shallice,et al.  Preserved recall versus impaired recognition. A case study. , 1990, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[20]  Alan J. Parkin,et al.  Pathological False Alarm Rates Following Damage to the Left Frontal Cortex , 1996, Brain and Cognition.

[21]  J. Gardiner.  Functional aspects of recollective experience , 1988, Memory & cognition.

[22]  Charles J. Brainerd,et al.  FALSE-RECOGNITION REVERSAL: WHEN SIMILARITY IS DISTINCTIVE , 1995 .

[23]  S. Petersen,et al.  Hemispheric Specialization in Human Dorsal Frontal Cortex and Medial Temporal Lobe for Verbal and Nonverbal Memory Encoding , 1998, Neuron.

[24]  Marcia K. Johnson,et al.  The role of prefrontal cortex during tests of episodic memory , 1998, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[25]  H. Nelson.  A Modified Card Sorting Test Sensitive to Frontal Lobe Defects , 1976, Cortex.

[26]  G. Zubicaray,et al.  Nelson's (1976) modified card sorting test: A review , 1996 .

[27]  A. Mayes,et al.  What do theories of the functional deficit(s) underlying amnesia have to explain? , 1997, Memory.

[28]  Antonio R. Damasio,et al.  The Brain Binds Entities and Events by Multiregional Activation from Convergence Zones , 1989, Neural Computation.

[29]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Why there are complementary learning systems in the hippocampus and neocortex: insights from the successes and failures of connectionist models of learning and memory. , 1995, Psychological review.

[30]  P M Grasby,et al.  Brain systems for encoding and retrieval of auditory-verbal memory. An in vivo study in humans. , 1995, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[31]  F. Craik,et al.  Hemispheric encoding/retrieval asymmetry in episodic memory: positron emission tomography findings. , 1994, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[32]  F. Craik,et al.  Levels of Pro-cessing: A Framework for Memory Research , 1975 .

[33]  P W Burgess,et al.  Confabulation and the control of recollection. , 1996, Memory.

[34]  Marcia K. Johnson,et al.  Left prefrontal activation during episodic remembering: an event‐related fMRI study , 1998, Neuroreport.

[35]  Andrew P. Smith,et al.  Memory impairment following ruptured aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery , 1988, Brain and Cognition.

[36]  Larry L. Jacoby,et al.  The construction of subjective experience: Memory attributions , 1990 .

[37]  Daniel L. Schacter,et al.  Suppressing False Recognition in Younger and Older Adults: The Distinctiveness Heuristic ☆ ☆☆ ★ , 1999 .

[38]  D. Schacter,et al.  False recognition and the right frontal lobe: A case study , 1996, Neuropsychologia.

[39]  Ronald M. Ruff,et al.  The ruff figural fluency test: A normative study with adults , 1987 .

[40]  J. Desmond,et al.  Material‐specific lateralization of prefrontal activation during episodic encoding and retrieval , 1998, Neuroreport.

[41]  C. Reynolds,et al.  Wechsler memory scale-revised , 1988 .

[42]  E Tulving,et al.  Neuroanatomical correlates of retrieval in episodic memory: auditory sentence recognition. , 1994, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.