Prefrontal lobes and the attentional control: a neuropsychological study using modified Stroop test]

The prefrontal lobes may play an important role in attentional and cognitive control. The modified Stroop test can detect the disorder of this regulatory function in the brain-damaged patients. The Stroop conflict task was given to 35 prefrontal damaged patients (prefrontal group) and 20 subjects with temporal or parietal lesions (posterior group). The prefrontal subjects were further divided into the three subgroups, which consisted of 17 dorsolateral, 6 medial and 12 orbitofrontal patients. There were no significant differences between the prefrontal and posterior group on the Stroop test. However, the dorsolateral prefrontal damaged subgroup and the medial prefrontal damaged subgroup had significantly poor performances than the posterior group on the incongruent condition of the Stroop test. This findings indicated that the impairment of attentional control between the word reading and color naming resulted from the lesions of dorsolateral and medial part of prefrontal lobes. The cognitive control of visual attention may be supported by the neural substrates including dorsolateral prefrontal lobe, supplementary motor area and anterior cingulate cortex.