Prefrontal contributions to initiation, suppression and strategy: A neuropsychological study of focal frontal patients
-
1
The University of Queensland, Neuropsychology Research Unit, School of Psychology, Australia
-
2
The Wesley Hospital, BrizBrain & Spine, Australia
-
3
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Neuropsychology, U.K.
-
4
University of Palermo, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Italy
-
5
The Wesley Hospital, BrizBrain & Spine, Australia
-
6
Santa Lucia Foundation, Neuroimaging Laboratory, Italy
-
7
University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, U.K.
-
8
International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Italy
Initiation and suppression deficits are documented in patients with frontal lesions although this has typically been with different tasks that are hard to compare. The Hayling Sentence Completion Test (Burgess & Shallice, 1997) was designed to tap initiation, suppression and strategy use within the same sentence completion task. There are few studies specifically investigating the neural correlates of initiation and suppression using the same task in frontal patients. We investigated initiation, suppression and strategy use on the Hayling Test in 40 frontal patients, 30 posterior patients and 40 matched healthy controls. Lesions were analysed with a finer-grained frontal localisation method (Right/Left Lateral, Medial) and traditional methods (i.e., anterior/posterior). We analysed the standard clinical measures (Initiation RT, Suppression RT, Suppression Errors and Overall Score), composite error scores and strategic responses. The results showed that all four Hayling Test clinical measures were sensitive to frontal lesions; however, only Suppression Errors and the Overall measure were specific to frontal lobe damage. All frontal patients produced blatant suppression failures but there was a specific Right Lateral frontal effect for producing subtly incorrect responses. In addition, Right Lateral patients produced fewer correct strategic responses and incurred longer response times in doing so. These findings suggest that the right lateral frontal cortex plays a role in suppression and strategic processes.
Keywords:
Neuropsychology,
Prefrontal Cortex,
Strategy use,
Hayling Test,
verbal suppression
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Cognition and Executive Processes
Citation:
Robinson
G,
Walker
D,
Cipolotti
L,
Biggs
V,
Bozzali
M and
Shallice
T
(2015). Prefrontal contributions to initiation, suppression and strategy: A neuropsychological study of focal frontal patients.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00361
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Gail Robinson, The University of Queensland, Neuropsychology Research Unit, School of Psychology, Brisbane, Australia, g.robinson@psy.uq.edu.au