Plans, actions, and mental sets: Managerial knowledge units in the frontal lobes

This chapter focuses on the frontal lobe patient, his psychological disorders and competency in day-to-day functioning. It suggests that some strategies for the evaluation of patients with frontal lobe lesions. The chapter argues that lesions to the frontal lobe in humans specifically affect and impair the kind of representations. The ability to form and shift concepts allows humans to be flexible in planning and estimating. Conditional learning is a rudimentary form of the managerial knowledge units (MKU) and can be directly impaired by damage to the frontal lobes. Production systems can be impaired independent of the representation of actions. The semantic MKUs tend to be more abstract or context-free representations and are less susceptible to damage than context-dependent MKUs because context-dependent MKUs such as eating in a specific restaurant would be activated less frequently than a context-free MKU such as eating out.