ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a disturbances manifested in a type of intellectual function, i.e., those involved in outlining and recounting a written text. It involves a comparative analysis of patients with parieto-occipital or with frontal lobe lesions. The construction of an outline of a perused text represents the most complicated requirements for the orienting basis of an intellectual act. The disturbances characteristic of the patients were also manifested when they recounted relatively simple narrative texts: sometimes the narrations followed the text very closely, often the individual fragments of the exposition were unrelated, and sometimes the sequence of the exposition was interrupted by incidental associations that occurred to the patients as they read the text. Patients were able to narrate a known episode or series of episodes, but they were unable to formulate a preliminary outline; and they were incapable of relating a story in accordance with an outline.
