Recovery of Function After Serial Lesions of Prefrontal Cortex in the Rhesus Monkey

Abstract

I first met Nelson Butters at a Clark University reception in the late 1960’s where I had joined the faculty as a new assistant professor. Nelson had just returned to Boston from Kent State University in Ohio to take a position in neuropsychology at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Nelson had taken his degree in clinical psychology from Clark University and followed this training with a post-doctoral research fellowship in the laboratory of Mortimer Mishkin and Enger Rosvold at the National Institutes of Health. At the time, the NIH laboratory was the leading place to be for primate research on the cortical mechanisms of learning and memory. Using selective damage to the monkey cortex as an investigative technique, the NIH investigators performed dozens of studies to examine the role of the frontal cortex in cognitive performance and spatial learning. The many papers coming from that laboratory set the standard for thinking about structure function relationships in the central nervous system.