A preliminary experiment on long-term memory with realistic and abstract visual patterns in uniltateral focal hemisphere-damaged patients.

Sixty-seven focal hemisphere-damaged patients (38 to the left hemisphere and 29 to the right hemisphere) were tested for forgetting of realistic and abstract visual patterns over a 40-sec to 5-min interval by means of a recognition task. No forgetting took place in any group, even if abstract patterns proved to be poorly recognized both at 40 sec and at 5 min. The authors conclude that focal neocortical unilateral lesions do not significantly hamper the semantic code processes involved in the Long-Term Memory of the patterns employed in this experiment.