BACKGROUND Pragmatic communication abilities may depend on intact frontal lobe systems. Independent evidence suggests that some persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired on measures of frontal lobe function. HYPOTHESIS We therefore hypothesized in Study 1 that pragmatic communication skills would be impaired in some persons with PD and would be linked to frontal dysfunction in these ...

Visuospatial construction, traditionally viewed as a putative parietal function, also requires sustained attention, planning, organization strategies and error correction, and hence frontal lobe mediation. The relative contributions of the frontal and parietal lobes are poorly understood. To examine the contributions of parietal, frontal lobes, as well as right and left cerebral hemispheres to ...

Although it has long been thought that frontal lobe abnormality must play an important part in generating the severe impairment in higher-order social, emotional and cognitive functions in autism, only recently have studies identified developmentally early frontal lobe defects. At the microscopic level, neuroinflammatory reactions involving glial activation, migration defects and excess cerebra...

Behavioural findings indicate that the core executive functions of inhibition and working memory are closely linked, and neuroimaging studies indicate overlap between their neural correlates. There has not, however, been a comprehensive study, including several inhibition tasks and several working memory tasks, performed by the same subjects. In the present study, 11 healthy adult subjects comp...