Impaired retrieval from remote memory in patients with frontal lobe damage

Abstract

Patients with unilateral dorsolateral frontal lobe lesions and matched controls were given 2 tests of remote memory for public information, the Public Events Test and the Famous Faces Test. On both tests, the patients with frontal lobe lesions exhibited impaired recall for remote information. Recognition memory was relatively preserved. Provision of semantic and phonemic cues in the Famous Faces Test did not completely compensate for their recall deficit. These findings suggest that the remote memory impairment exhibited by frontal patients may be related to deficits in strategic search of memory. These deficits in retrieval from remote memory extend the array of memory deficits associated with damage to the frontal lobes. Frontal lobe lesions have been associated with a variety of memory impairments, including deficits in short-term memory, free recall, metamemory, and memory for temporal informa-tion (for review, see Fuster, 1989; Shimamura, 1994; Stuss, Eskes, & Foster, 1994). Yet patients with frontal lobe lesions can exhibit normal performance on standard clinical assess-ments of new learning ability (e.g., Wechsler Memory Scale— Revised; WMS-R; Wechsler, 1987), suggesting that their memory deficits are not due to severe anterograde amnesi