摘要：Although theoretical accounts of inhibition have generally assumed that it is a single construct, data fromindividual differences (Friedman & Miyake, 2004), neuroimaging (Nee, Jonides, & Berman, 2007; Nee, Wager, &Jonides, 2007), and aging (Allen & Martin, in preparation) have provided evidence of dissociations betweendifferent types of inhibitory control mechanisms. For example, there is evidence that response-distractor inhibition,which involves resolving interference from dominant responses or distractors in the external environment, is differentfrom resistance to proactive interference (PI), which involves overcoming interference from previously relevantrepresentations in memory. However, previous work on patients with aphasia has provided little evidence ofdissociations between these two inhibition mechanisms (Hamilton & Martin, 2005), though this may be due to thesmall number of tasks used to assess patient performance. The present study extended previous work byinvestigating the inhibitory control abilities of two patients with aphasia: patient EV, whose lesion included leftfrontal regions hypothesized to play a critical role in interference resolution, and patient MB whose lesion wasrestricted to posterior regions. The first question we addressed was whether more extensive testing would revealdissociations among tasks tapping the two types of inhibition and the second was whether interference resolutionwould be related to left frontal (but not posterior) brain lesions, consistent with neuroimaging results.
