ABSTRACT
An investigation of the effects of damage to the human frontal cortex on the learning of spatial and nonspatial conditional tasks has been completed. This work examined the performance of patients with unilateral frontal or temporal lobe excisions, carried out for the relief of pharmacologically intractable epilepsy, in learning various conditional tasks designed to be similar to those that had previously been used with experimental animals. In the work carried out with nonhuman primates, damage to the periarcuate cortex has resulted in severe impairments in various conditional tasks in which one or another response had to be produced when the appropriate cue that was physically separate from the responses was given. In one of the experiments with nonhuman primates, the effect of periarcuate lesions on a motor conditional task designed to be similar to the motor task that had previously been administered to the patients was examined.
