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Two major lines of investigation are currently clarifying the nature of the impairment of working memory associated with normal aging. Cognitive psychology has formulated the problem in terms such as the balance of impairment of encoding, retrieval, storage and/or attention, whereas neuropsychology has formulated the problem in terms such as the balance of frontal (executive) versus temporal (mnemonic) degeneration. The findings of this study support the contention that the primary impairment of working memory in early normal aging is an active attentional executive processing deficit. Specifically, on the Self-Ordered Pointing Task, there is significantly ineffective exploitation of top-down clustering strategy as a function of aging. On this task, self-organization of encoding and retrieval must occur simultaneously with ongoing responding. The finding cannot be explained as an impairment of encoding, retrieval, storage, or build-up and/or release of proactive interference, since indexes of these did not discriminate young-adult from middle-aged samples.

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This study investigated potential predictors of intellectual outcome in 417 children and 218 adults who had sustained a unilateral cortical lesion. Of these, 295 cases were collected from the scientific literature and 340 from medical records at seven hospitals in Canada Different sets of predictors emerged for the Wechsler Verbal and Performance IQ values, accounting for differing variances (i.e., 12.4% and 20.1%, respectively). The volume of the lesion was the factor that explained the most variance (i.e., 4.95% and 11.7%, respectively). Age at lesion onset was significantly and positively correlated with verbal intelligence scores. This variable, considered independently or in interaction with other predictors, did not account for a large portion of the variance explained in intelligence. This refutes the commonly held notion that early onset of the insults results in a better prognosis.

Although several affective impairments have been demonstrated to occur following closed-head injury (CHI), deficits of the communicative function of language, particularly sentenial and suprasentential pragmatic aspects, have been suggested, but not demonstrated, to occur. This study compared 31 normals and 31 severely closed-head injured patients matched for age, sex and education. The dependent measures consisted of a facial test of emotion (FTE) and a contextual test of emotion (CTE). The former task consisted of 36 slides representing facial expressions of the six emotions demonstrated by Ekman and colleagues to be transcultural, namely, job, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The subject was required to name the appropriate emotion for each slide. The latter task consisted of correctly identifying the appropriate emotion for each of 36 brief verbal narratives representing contexts connotative of the same six transcultural emotions. The CHI patients were impaired overall on the FTE but not the CTE. However, the ability to identify anger was significantly impaired on both tasks when considered in isolation from the other emotions. It was concluded that a processing deficit of primary emotional material, particularly anger, does exist following CHI, but that this deficit is not necessarily independent of task and/or modality parameters. It was also concluded that evidence of a pragmatic deficit of the language function following CHI remains to be provided at this time.