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Background White matter pathways connecting brain regions involved in language processing in the left prefrontal (PFC) and temporal cortices have been found to play a critical role in language comprehension (Turken and Dronkers, 2011). Among the frontal brain regions associated with language processing, the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) has also been strongly associated with resolving proactive interference in working memory (Jonides and Nee, 2006). Here we investigated whether the white matter pathways connecting the lIFG to the left temporal lobe found to be important in language comprehension were also critical for resolving proactive interference in working memory. Methods We tested 4 patients with left PFC damage involving the lIFG, 5 with left temporal damage and 6 age-matched controls. Critically, 2 left PFC patients and 1 left temporal patient had lesions involving a complete disconnection between the lIFG and the left temporal cortex and the remaining patients had partial disconnection only. Performance was assessed using the Recent Probes test (Monsell, 1978): 4 visually-presented letters are followed by a probe: one central letter. The task was to decide whether or not the probe was part of the immediately preceding set of letters. Whether or not the probe was also part of the previous trial and elicited a positive or negative response was then manipulated and created recent negative (RN) and recent positive trials, respectively. RN trials generated interference in trial n compared to non-recent negative (NN) trials. Behavioral results were reported using error rates as the dependent variable. Results When the groups were separated based on which cortical lobe was damaged, there was a significant main interference effect (F(1,12)=24.94, p |
