Abstract: This study explored the role of frontal lobe in associative perceptual priming and perceptual priming effects. Twenty-five frontal lobe lesioned patients and 18 age, gender and education matched control subjects were examined. Each patient did general basic neuropsychological tasks, then they did color naming (25 patients), word naming (11 patients) and corresponding recognition tasks in counterbalanced order. The results demonstrated that in both speeded naming tasks, the patients did not show any facilitation on the reaction time of the old colored word relative to the recombined ones, suggesting their impairments both in associative priming and perceptual priming. The recognition memory of mild memory deficit patients was not significantly different from that of the controls. The correlation analysis showed that there were modest but significant correlation between associative priming, perceptual priming effects and some of frontal lobe functions. These results suggest that the frontal lobe plays a role in associative perceptual priming and perceptual priming effects, probably mediated by its executive functions such as inhibition and selective attention

Key words: associative priming, perceptual priming, frontal lobe, implicit memory, executive functions