Memory difficulties with frontal lobe lesions
What types of memory difficulties occur with frontal lobe lesions ?
Frontal lobe damage can lead to important cognitive, emotional, and social dysfunction.
The frontal lobes are organized into three basic subdivisions: precentral, premotor, and prefrontal.
The prefrontal division is crucial for higher order functions like planning, judgment, reasoning, decision making, emotional regulation, and social conduct.
It can be further subdivided into ventromedial prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and superior medial prefrontal cortex.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is important for working memory and “metamemory,” which has executive control over the memory apparatus.
For example, it decides whether a retrieved memory is plausible for a given context, does strategic searching of the memory store, and temporally orders memories. Working memory holds about 7 to 10 bits of information as long as they are constantly repeated.
Prefrontal damage and difficulty with working memory may manifest as interference with learning and impairment in performing tasks requiring delayed responses.
An impairment of declarative memory in conjunction with frontal lobe dysfunction may cause confabulation , which is the inability to distinguish a true memory from a false memory or from a memory inappropriate for the context.
Confabulations are a common occurrence in alcoholic Korsakoff’s syndrome.
Frontal cortical lesions can also cause disorders of one or more functions that facilitate memory, such as learning strategies , retrieval strategies , and learning efficiency .
