Recall of the end-position of examiner-defined arm movements by patients with frontal- or temporal-lobe lesions.

Sixty-three patients with unilateral temporal- or frontal-lobe excisions and 14 normal control subjects were tested on a kinesthetic task in which they had to recall the end-position of arm movements determined by the examiner. Patients with left frontal-lobe or small right frontal-lobe excisions performed normally, whereas patients with temporal-lobe excisions that included extensive removal of the hippocampus performed poorly, but only after a delay during which an interpolated task was carried out. Subjects with large right frontal-lobe removals were impaired in delayed recall, and the presence of an interpolated task did not exacerbate the impairment, which was equal for the two arms. The results point to an important role played by the right frontal lobe in the maintenance of kinesthetic-location cues over time, but not in their initial encoding.