Abstract: This case study was to explore the role of frontal lobe in the organization of remote memory. The performance of a 64 year old patient (QCY) in various tasks, including famous person test, famous event test, general knowledge test, and autobiographical memory interview, was compared with the performance of five normal control subjects. MRI and PET imaging demonstrated that the lesions of QCY were in the bilateral frontal lobe, left diencephalon, and left parahippocampus. The Wisconsin card sorting test showed that QCY had higher response and preservative errors than the controls. Results in other tests showed that he had extensive anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia. QCY had deficits in recalling and recognizing the famous person and famous events. His episodic and semantic parts of autobiographical memory were impaired as well. The patterns of the retrograde amnesia of QCY were(1) his retrograde amnesia did not show a temporal gradient, but a flat gradient; (2) his memory of his childhood was impaired. These two characteristics were different from patterns shown by patients with lesions in the medial temporal lobe diencephalon system, indicating that the frontal lobe participated in the retrieval process of remote memory.

Key words: retrograde amnesia, frontal lobe, remote memory