No abstract

The effect of frontal lobe lesions on the accuracy of prediction of recall in a word list learning task was studied. Fifty-nine patients with a focal brain lesion and 21 non-brain-damaged control patients memorized a word list by selective reminding and predicted before each recall trial the number of words they would be able to recall. The patients with left frontal lesions, who were inferior to the patients with right frontal lesions and the control patients in word list recall, overpredicted their recall more than the other brain-damaged patients or the control patients, especially on the 1st trial. The patients with right frontal lesions were less accurate in the prediction of recall than the patients with right posterior lesions or the control patients.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to auditory stimuli were recorded from 11 closed head injured (CHI) and 10 age-matched healthy adults. Auditory stimuli consisted of sequences of repetitive standard tones (600 Hz), occasionally replaced by deviant tones (660 Hz) or by natural novel sounds. Subjects were instructed to ignore auditory stimuli while concentrating on a demanding visuo-motor tracking task. CHI patients showed, in comparison to control subjects, significantly enhanced late P3a component in the ERPs to novel sounds. This suggests that novel stimuli cause greater distraction in CHI patients than in controls, demonstrating that ERPs provide a powerful tool to determine the physiological basis of attentional deficits in CHI patients.

This study partly supports the hypothesis that frontal lobe lesions cause impairment of metamemory. Fifty-nine patients with a focal brain lesion and 21 non-brain-damaged patients memorized a 4 X 4 matrix of 16 faces in 6 consecutive trials and predicted the number of locations of faces they would be able to remember before each retrieval. When age-related impairment of learning was adjusted, the patients with right posterior lesions were inferior to the controls and to the patients with right frontal lesions on the total number of correctly placed faces. The patients with right frontal lesions were less accurate than the patients with right posterior lesions or the controls in the prediction of retrieval. The inaccuracy of retrieval prediction in the face test was associated with that in a word-list learning task.

The article explores the ways in which young people use their everyday environments and how they give meanings to their surroundings. It concentrates on the potential of the re-interpretations of 1970s time-geography by applying the method of timespace paths to educational contexts in both universities and schools. The point of view is methodological. The piloting phase took place during a number of courses on environmental education of the university level and, based on the experience gained, the method was re-developed for secondary school levels. The data were gathered from eight schools in Finland as part of the 'Liikkeelle!' ('On the move!') project, funded by the Finnish National Board of Education, where the main aim was to take students' own neighbourhoods into account in teaching. The students were asked to make observations of their environment over a one-day period and to take photographs, which could all be used later as material for the construction of their unique time-space paths. The main contents of the paths have been analysed in the article, but more emphasis have been placed on an evaluation of the exercise in order to offer ideas for further development of these methods.