Cognitive flexibility and mental programming after closed head injuries and anterior or posterior cerebral excisions.

Cognitive inflexibility and deficient mental programming are specifically related to frontal lobe lesions. The aim was to demonstrate that closed head injury (CHI) patients with brain lesions verified by computed tomography have such cognitive deficits, and are inferior in these respects to patients with posterior cerebral excisions mainly for tumours. This hypothesis was confirmed using a Category Identification and Sorting test as well as a measure of mental programming in a Spatial Learning task. Furthermore, CHI patients who had non-frontal parenchymal lesions were inferior by these measures to patients with posterior excisions. This result suggests that diffuse axonal lesion in CHI causes the deficits similar to those following frontal lobe excision.