Focus will be on Frontal Lobes (prefrontal cortex)  because they are evolutionarily the most recent and therefore understanding their function may lead to an understanding of what makes primates 'special' intellectually.

Dysfunction of these lobes due to vascular, genetic or traumatic reasons produces symptoms that include various cognitive problems.

1. Associating remembered facts w/i a context relative to self. This symptom Squire (ch 7 schacter) calls 'source amnesia'.  Squire suggests that frrontal lobes provide the possibility of placing one-self autobiographically within a particular episode.  This type of memory is referred to as episodic memory.  This phenomenon of source amnesia is also seen in the very young and the aged and can be correlated with the fact that these  areas are slow to mature and are dysfunctional in the aged.
2. Another symptom of frontal lobe damage is that people are unable to make adjustments to their environment i.e. they perseverate (possibly relevant to obsessive/compulsive disorder).  This is illustrated by testing people using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.
3. Impaired ability to plan.  Some what seen in work done using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.  Also seen in patients behavior in everyday life.  Patients with frontal lobe dysfunction are unable to complete tasks that are multifaceted or require many steps.  They are easily distracted.
4. Patients tend to confabulate.  Impaired ability to develop associations between facts that are both semantic  as well as episodic which leads to their making up stories.  Text supplies ample evidence for this contention.  Furthermore, Moscovitch provides evidence that this phenomenon is a problem with search,  retrieval and monitoring but not storage.  This hypothesis is supported by the fact that confabulation involves premordbid as well as postmorbid memories.  Thus he suggests that, due to this work w/patients who confabulate, the dorsal lateral frontal cortex is involved in initiating and carrying out strategic serch of memory stores while the ventormedial portion is involved in monitoring and checking the validity of search results as well as holding back irrelevant responses.  Within this theory response omission occurs when the strategic search mechanism is very badly damaged while confabulation occurs is the retreival and search process is moderately impaired.  Brought up idea of executive function.