Revkin Susannah K, Piazza Manuela, Izard Véronique, Zamarian Laura, Karner Elfriede, Delazer Margarete
INSERM, U562, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France.
Neuropsychologia. 2008 Aug;46(10):2463-75. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.04.011. Epub 2008 Apr 22.
Patients with frontal lobe damage have been shown to produce implausible answers in cognitive estimation, a task requiring approximate answers to quantity-related questions of general semantic knowledge. We investigated a patient with frontal lobe damage who presented executive deficits and difficulties in cognitive estimation. The patient also showed difficulties in verbal numerosity estimation (approximately evaluating the quantity of visually presented sets of items), as he produced extreme answers well outside healthy participants' range of answers. A series of tasks evidenced intact number processing and well preserved semantic representation of numbers. Detailed investigation of estimation processes suggested a deficit at the level of translation from an intact semantic representation of numbers to output, whether verbal or non-symbolic. This case study allows disentangling different processes involved in estimation and contributes to a better understanding of the cognitive estimation deficits frequently reported for patients with frontal lesions.
额叶损伤患者在认知估计任务中会给出不合理的答案，该任务要求对与一般语义知识相关的数量问题给出近似答案。我们研究了一名额叶损伤患者，他存在执行功能缺陷和认知估计困难。该患者在言语数字估计（大致评估视觉呈现的项目集数量）方面也存在困难，因为他给出的极端答案远远超出了健康参与者的答案范围。一系列任务证明其数字处理完好，数字的语义表征保存良好。对估计过程的详细研究表明，在从完好的数字语义表征到输出（无论是言语还是非符号形式）的转换层面存在缺陷。本案例研究有助于厘清估计中涉及的不同过程，并有助于更好地理解额叶病变患者经常出现的认知估计缺陷。
