Patients with damage to the mesial and anterior portions of the temporal lobes suffer from a memory impairment involving both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. In the retrograde domain, it has been suggested that the relative severity of autobiographical and nonautobiographical memory impairment may depend on the prevalent side of the temporal damage. Here we present two patients suffering from damage to the mesial and anterior portions of the temporal lobes (hippocampal formation, parahippocampal gyrus and polar cortex) as a result of herpes encephalitis. In the first case, A.S., damage predominantly affected the right temporal lobe, whereas in the second patient, R.S., the damage was bilateral but more severe on the left side. A detailed investigation of the retrograde memory deficit demonstrated a partial double dissociation between the two patients, with A.S. almost exclusively impaired in the autobiographical domain (both episodic and semantic) and R.S. with poor performances in all domains, but much more severe in the nonautobiographical (both public events and general semantic knowledge) than in the autobiographical one. These findings reinforce the view of specialization of right and left temporal lobes in the retrieval of retrograde autobiographical and nonautobiographical memories, respectively. (JINS, 2008, 14, 1083–1094.)

Minutes from the Board of Governors Mid-Year Meeting, July 3, 2007, and minutes from the Mid-Year Business Meeting, July 6, 2007.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) has often been associated with reduced verbal fluency performance. This study aimed to directly assess semantic switching as a function of STN stimulation in PD participants with the Homophone Meaning Generation Test (HMGT). Seventeen participants with PD who had received STN DBS completed the HMGT in on and off stimulation conditions. Twenty-one non-neurologically impaired participants acted as controls. PD participants (in both on and off stimulation conditions) generated significantly fewer meanings than control participants and consistent with the previous reports of verbal fluency impairment, PD participants produced fewer definitions in the on stimulation condition. PD participants (in both on and off stimulation conditions) also had greater difficulty generating definitions for nonhomographic homophones compared with homographic homographs. The results of this study indicate that STN stimulation exacerbates impairment in semantic switching. (JINS, 2008, 14, 890–894.)

The Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology of Stroke. 2007. Olivier Godefroy and Julien Bogousslavsky (Eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 664 pp., $160.00 (HB)

The Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology of Stroke is a very handy reference book for the bedside or brief office examination of the stroke patient. The initial chapter highlights the need for serial mental status exams during the critical initial post stroke period. The book is then organized by functional sections, each containing several chapters. The sections are organized by neuropsychological processes in the usual “walk around the brain” format. Thus, the reader is offered sections on motor and gestural disorders, aphasia and arthric disorders, hemineglect and right hemisphere syndromes, agnosia and Balint's syndrome, and executive and memory disorders. Of great significance is the inclusion of a section on behavioral and mood disorders, which reviews the clinical domains where the disciplines of psychiatry and neurology overlap. The final section, dementia and anatomical left/right syndromes, extends and integrates the previous sections.

Recent and relevant.

The following is a correction for an error that occurred in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, May 2006. In the article titled “Is adaptation of the Word Accentuation Test of Premorbid Intelligence necessary for use among older, Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States,” pp. 391–399, by Robert W. Schrauf et al., on page 396 there is a misprint in the equation in the left column.

The Human Frontal Lobes: Functions and Disorders (Second Edition). 2007. Bruce L. Miller & Jeffrey L. Cummings (Eds.). New York: The Guilford Press, 666 pp., $95.00 (HB)

Miller and Cummings published their original text, The Human Frontal Lobes: Functions and Disorders, in 1999. At that time, their work was quite unique and provided a valuable reference for both health professionals and researchers in the emerging field of the frontal lobes. The years since then have seen an increasing focus on these fascinating brain structures across a range of disciplines including neurosciences, neurology, neuropsychology and psychiatry. The importance of the frontal structures for both cognition and emotion is firmly established and the complexity of these associations continues to challenge those working in these fields. As Miller and Cummings note, due to the major advances that have occurred since they first published their work, their second edition represents not only an update but also an introduction to a range of new issues. In particular, this second edition emphasizes advances in neurosciences and neuroimaging with a substantial amount of new material presented in these areas. In addition, the increasing interest in the role of the frontal lobes in social and emotional function is also acknowledged and discussed.

Subjects with depression exhibit deficits in prefrontal function. We posited that as a result, in a supraspan memory test, they would be impaired in their ability to inhibit recall of irrelevant words, and because of consequent overload of working and episodic memory capacity, would be impaired in their ability to recall relevant words. We tested this hypothesis in 30 inpatients and outpatients with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and 30 controls subjects using a form of the Directed Forgetting Paradigm using exclusively neutral words. The depressed subjects did exhibit deficits in prefrontal function. All subjects were given four lists of 24 items each, in which half the words were followed by the instruction “remember” and half by the instruction “forget.” Our hypothesis found support in a significant group by item type interaction effect exhibited when subjects were instructed to recall only those items followed by the “remember” instruction: depressed subjects recalled relatively more words to be forgotten and relatively fewer words to be remembered. A control experiment suggested that these results could not be accounted for by a differential effect of depression on memory encoding. (JINS, 2008, 14, 895–899.)

The following is a correction for an error that occurred in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Vol. 14, No. 2, March 2008. In the article titled “Social Behavior Following Traumatic Brain Injury and its Association with Emotion Recognition, Understanding Of Intentions and Cognitive Flexibility,” pp. 318–326, by Maarten Milders et al., on page 323 there is a misprint in Table 2B.

The following are corrections for errors that occurred in JINS, Vol. 14, No. 2, March 2008. In the article titled “Visual Hemispatial Neglect, Re-assessed,” pp. 243–256, by Alexandra List et al., there were errors in Tables 3 and 5, and in Figures 6 and 7.

In this issue of JINS, Gasparini and her colleagues (2008) report a subject with a right anterior choroidal artery territory stroke that damaged the anterior hippocampus, but likely more importantly, much of the ventral posterior limb of the internal capsule, effectively disconnecting the right thalamus from temporal cortex. Through systematic cognitive neuropsychological detective work, they provide a compelling case that the essential deficit was one of working memory. This is potentially a very important discovery. The thalamus is a phylogenetically ancient structure, and there is considerable evidence that, in human beings, much of its function has been subsumed by cortical mechanisms (Nadeau & Crosson, 1997). Consequently, there are fundamental limits to how much animal studies can inform us about human thalamic functions, and we are particularly reliant on cognitive neuropsychological studies like this one. The work of Gasparini et al. also provides a fine demonstration of the continuing value of cognitive neuropsychology in advancing our understanding of the details of brain function.

Recent and relevant.

Visual Imagery is the ability to generate mental images in the absence of perception, that is, “seeing with the mind's eye.” We describe a patient, IM, who suffered from an acute ischemic stroke in the right anterior choroidal artery who appeared to demonstrate relatively isolated impairment in visual imagery. Her cognitive function, including her performance on tests of semantic function, was at ceiling, apart from a deficit in visual memory. IM failed in tasks involving degraded stimuli, object decision involving reality judgments on normal animals, and drawings from memory. By contrast, she was able to match objects seen from an unfamiliar viewpoint and to perform tasks of semantic and visual association. We hypothesize that IM has a visual working memory deficit that impairs her ability to generate full visual representations of objects given their names, individual feature, or partial representations. The deficit appears to be the result of damage to connections between the right thalamus and the right temporal lobe. Our findings may help to clarify the role of the thalamus in the cortical selective engagement processes that underlie working memory. (JINS, 2008, 14, 902–911.)

The success of JINS as a scientific journal depends on thoughtful, honest, and prompt peer review. Such review would be impossible without the extensive help of colleagues. We wish to acknowledge the following reviewers for manuscripts reviewed between September 1, 2007 and August 31, 2008, with sincere appreciation. Please note that, occasionally, because of the way time frames are figured, a reviewer's name might not appear in this year's list either because s/he was acknowledged previously, or will be thanked in the forthcoming cycle.