What impairments would you expect to see following lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex? Compare and contrast with lesions affecting the dorsolateral prefontal cortex. In 1948 Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction foreman, was involved in a terrible accident during which a tire iron was explosively forced upward through his left cheek and out the top of his head (Harlow, 1948). He stunned his colleagues by not only surviving the event and quickly regaining consciousness, but also walking to a nearby cart. Gage regained many of his physical and mental abilities, but remained altered in his personality to the point of being considered "coarse, profane, coarse, and vulgar" (Bigelow, 1851), having previously been considered diligent and pleasant. The curious case of this gentleman with extensive brain damage but with very preserved functionality has fueled interest and research on the localization of functions within the brain. Although the exact nature of Gage's lesions has been the subject of much debate (Ratiu et al., 2004), it is generally accepted that much of his left prefrontal cortex was damaged, including the medial and lateral orbitofrontal and prefrontal Dorsolateral. regions. Stuss and colleagues (2002) argue that clinical neuropsychology in its simplest form is “the understanding of brain-behavior connections and their applications to clinical situations.” In their review of the history of clinical neuropsychology, they talk about three fields that have contributed to our current understanding of the brain's behavioral connections, including 1) behavioral neurology, 2) neuropsychiatry, and 3) clinical neuropsychology. Within these disciplines, a number of techniques are used to investigate the area... the center of the paper... or the temporal cortex during word generation. However, dlPFC changes are not observed during tasks in which they are required to make lexical decisions upon hearing words, suggesting that the dlPFC plays a role in modulating word generation ( Frith et al., 1991 ). In a study of the effects of focal anterior and posterior brain regions on verbal fluency, Stuss and colleagues (1998) suggest that, although deficits are observed with superior medial frontal damage, those with left dlPFC, left striatal, and left parietal damage are more impaired on letter based fluency. Patients with right dlPFC lesions do not show deficits in this task. The same lesions also produced deficits in category-based fluency, but so did right dlPFC damage. They are that the specific role of the dlPFC in these tasks is initiation and activation, verbal articulatory rehearsal and sustained production.