ABSTRACT
In 1890 the surgeon Burckhart was the first to believe that removing parts of the frontal lobe could alleviate psychiatric symptoms and this tradition culminated in the widespread use of frontal leucotomy during the 1930s and 1940s. From our modern perspective we can identify the fabrications as a memory disorder known as confabulation—one of the memory problems associated with damage to the frontal lobes. Straightforward explanations rarely survive in psychology and our investigations of JB are no exception—as became evident when we attempted further tests of the familiarity hypothesis. JB’s continuing memory impairment has resulted in an extreme tendency for him to repeat himself and this makes it very difficult to spend any amount of time with him. Any theory of familiarity-based recognition memory will predict that higher false alarm rates will be encountered on recognition tests which use distractors that have some similarity to targets.
