Frontal verbal amnesia. Phonological amnesia.

Although aphasic patients with frontal lobe damage may demonstrate impaired retention of verbal material, significant anterograde memory disturbances have not, to our knowledge, been reported with a minor Broca's aphasia. We describe a patient with minor Broca's aphasia who exhibited an unusual and profound anterograde memory disturbance, especially for phonologically specified stimuli. We suggest that this disturbance is attributable to an impairment in the volitional, controlled search of stored phonological information.

Directional hypokinesia and hemispatial inattention in neglect.

Subjects with neglect of left hemispace may err to the right when bisecting lines. This error has been attributed either to a directional hypokinesia (failure to execute movements fully in or towards the contralateral hemispace) or to a failure to attend to or represent sensory information. Four subjects with neglect were tested on a line bisection task in which these two hypotheses were differentiated by preventing direct viewing of the line and instead using a video camera and monitor, each of which could be moved independently into right or left hemispace. The performance of 2 subjects was consistent with the predictions of the directional hypokinesia hypothesis; the performance of the other 2 subjects was consistent with the attention-representation deficit hypothesis. These data suggest that both a directional hypokinesia and an attention-representation deficit may each be a primary determinant of neglect.