Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

This study used perceptual identification task to explore the role of frontal lobe in priming for new associations. 25 frontal lobe lesioned patients and 18 normal subjects who matched in age and education were tested. In the study session, subjects were presented a series of unrelated word pairs and asked to make a meaningful sentence with the two words. In the test session, perceptual identification task was performed. Subjects were asked to read the old, recombined and new pairs of Chinese words as quickly as possible. The patients failed to identify the old unrelated word pairs more than the recombined ones. Their associative priming effect was lower than that of the control subjects. Moreover, the recognition performance of the patients with mild memory deficit was similar with that of the control subjects, but their associative priming was lower than that of the normal controls also. The phenomenon of comparable normal recognition but impaired associative priming manifested the dissociation between implicit memory and explicit memory. The correlation between associative priming and preservative response, preservative errors, conceptual level responses and word fluency test was significant. It indicated the mechanisms underlying the frontal lobe participating in associative priming were semantic processing, sorting, inhibition, word fluency, and so on.

In conclusion, the current study demonstrated that the patients with focal lesions in the frontal lobe did not show priming for new associations. It suggested that frontal lobe may play a role in priming for new associations with unrelated word pairs as material.

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