Damage to the prefrontal cortex leads to decomposition of structured event complexes

Head injury often results in focal prefrontal lobe lesions that may account for specific posttraumatic cognitive and personality changes. These changes are briefly reviewed as well as some of the theoretical constructs used to describe the kinds of cognitive processes that are stored in prefrontal cortex. A new framework for describing prefrontal cortex function is then introduced that provides a rational and theoretically rich cognitive architecture that lends itself to hypothesis testing.