ABSTRACT

Brenda Milner began testing her patients on tasks requiring them to spot visually incongruous objects in picture scenes – work that was to show perceptual deficits which became more marked after right hemisphere lesions. If the advances into understanding the role of the medial temporal lobes in memory were the only accomplishments of Milner's, then they would have been sufficient for her to be placed into the pantheon of great psychologists. Milner has adopted the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography scanning to examine the brain regions involved in spatial memory and language, including the neural basis of unilingual and bilingual speech. Her work would highlight the behavioural inflexibility and poor planning of individuals with frontal lobe damage and identify the dorsolateral region as important in the remembrance of time events.