Recovery of Function after Focal Cerebral Insult

Abstract

Nelson Butters is world-renowned for his investigations of human cognitive disorders. Butters’ seminal explorations of subhuman primate cognition with his collaborators Donald G. Stein and Jeffrey J. Rosen, while not as well-known, have been equally influential in directing another important area of research. These investigators were pathbreaking in their examinations of the mechanisms underlying recovery of function following lesions of dorsolateral frontal cortex in monkeys. Butters and his colleagues [e.g. 1973, 1974; Rosen et al, 1971] hypothesized that cortex immediately adjacent to a cortical lesion, as well as more distant association cortices, play a critical role in recovery and reorganization of function following cortical ablation in the adult. This work anticipated more recent investigations of CNS plasticity and reorganization following insult in subhuman primates [e.g. Kaas, 1992]. As we suggest below, the lessons derived from Butters’ prescient observations of primates may also provide powerful constraints on modeling in human cognitive neuroscience.