ABSTRACT
For well over a century, it has been known that the frontal lobes are involved in the ordering of the motor movements required in the effective performance of any action with a decision element (Bianchi, 1895; Feuchtwanger, 1923; Jastrowitz, 1888; Kleist, 1934; Luria, 1973). More recently, however, it has become clear that the role of the frontal lobes includes the control of cognitive processes. In the past 20 years or so, a considerable body of evidence has converged upon the view that the frontal regions of the brain, rather than themselves performing specific cognitive operations such as memorising, learning or reasoning, are concerned instead with the deployment of the capacity to carry out such processes, which take place elsewhere in the brain. That is to say, the frontal lobes are thought to have a supervisory or “executive” function; in fact, many neuropsychologists use the adjectives “frontal” and “executive” interchangeably, a practice which ignores the problems inherent in mixing functional and anatomical terms (Tranel, Anderson, & Benton, 1994).
