Performance of patients with unilateral temporal lobectomy on selective reminding procedures using either related or unrelated words.

The present study compared the performance of patients with right (RTL) and left temporal lobectomy (LTL) with normal controls on two selective reminding procedures using either unrelated or semantically-related word-lists. LTL patients were found to be impaired relative to normal controls and RTL patients on both types of lists. The LTL patients entered fewer words into long-term storage (LTS) on each trial and showed a reduced ability to consistently recall such words on subsequent trials. The impaired initial learning of words and reduced subsequent recall of such words may reflect a unitary underlying deficiency. In addition, on the unrelated word-list, the LTL patients made significantly more intrusion errors than the other subject groups. Analyses of performance pattern indicate that LTL patients were able to benefit from the semantic-relatedness of words. RTL patients were impaired relative to normal controls on only the semantically-related word-list, both in entering words into LTS and the subsequent recall. These findings indicate that further studies of the semantic organization or its utilization of both RTL and LTL patients are warranted.