Hans-Lukas Teuber and ‘The Riddle of Frontal Lobe Function in Man’ as Published in The Frontal Granular Cortex and Behavior (1964)

The edited text titled, “The Frontal Granular Cortex and Behavior” by Warren and Akert (1964) is based on an historic symposium held two years earlier at The Pennsylvania State University. Approximately half of the participants were to play major roles in the early development of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience and several of the topical presentations in this text are landmark articles for neuropsychology, but in this special issue of Neuropsychological Review (NPR) the work of Hans-Lukas Teuber and his legacy will be reviewed. Teuber’s (1964) article was titled “The riddle of frontal lobe function in man” and is reproduced in its entirety in this issue of NPR. While this review is written 44 years after Teuber’s seminal contribution, many riddles of frontal lobe function remain, but had neuropsychology adhered to some of the creative experimental designs that were the signature of Teuber’s research, we may have been much further along in solving the riddle. Teuber’s 1964 article provides a comprehensive review of known neuropsychological conundrums of frontal lobe function at that time, but more importantly, it framed the direction of future research and how neuropsychologists should conduct research. Now with contemporary neuroimaging methods many of the hypotheses that Teuber postulated more than four decades earlier can actually be tested. Teuber’s contributions to neuropsychology are considerable but this 1964 chapter, his careful research designs, cogent neuropsychological thinking and clear writing style, exemplified by this chapter, set the stage for numerous hypotheses that guided research that not only attempted to solve the “riddle” of frontal function but also that of higher cortical function. To best understand the importance of Teuber’s work, an historical perspective on the beginnings of neuropsychology is needed. While the term ‘neuropsychology’ is in common use today, it was not when Teuber began his academic and research career in the late 1940s, early 1950s. Indeed, a search of the National Library of Medicine shows that the first reference to the term ‘neuropsychology’ does not occur until 1950 and when most of those early references are reviewed, the term neuropsychology was being used synonymously with physiological psychology, where most of the work was animal based. This was recognized in the preface by Warren and Akert (1964) where the traditional domain of physiological psychology and animal based research was beginning to influence theories of human function and brain-behavior relationships. Warren and Akert state that “a genuine comparative methodology also implies the development of clear communication between those who work with patients in the clinic and those who work with experimental animals in the laboratory. This volume testifies at many points to the continuing and effective interchange of concepts and techniques among the researchers dealing with people and with animals” (p. v). Teuber’s work exemplified the cross over of animal-based physiological psychology to human-based neuropsychology, but Teuber’s first published use of the term ‘neuropsychology’ in the title of one of his articles does not occur until 1969 (see Teuber 1969). This makes it all the more remarkable that this 1964 publication anticipates and outlines the types of research paradigms that became the genesis for Neuropsychol Rev (2009) 19:9–24 DOI 10.1007/s11065-009-9086-1