Ninety-two mixed etiology neurological patients and 216 control participants were assessed on a range of neuropsychological tests, including 10 neuropsychological measures of executive function derived from 6 different tests. People who knew the patients well (relatives or carers) completed a questionnaire about the patient's dysexecutive problems in everyday life, and this paper reports the extent to which the tests predicted the patients' everyday life problems. All of the tests were significantly predictive of at least some of the behavioral and cognitive deficits reported by patients' carers. However, factor analysis of the patients' dysexecutive symptoms suggested a fractionation of the dysexecutive syndrome, with neuropsychological tests loading differentially on 3 underlying cognitive factors (Inhibition, Intentionality, and Executive Memory), supporting the conclusions that different tests measure different cognitive processes, and that there may be limits to the fractionation of the executive system. (JINS, 1998, 4, 547–558.)

Parkin's criticisms of the central executive are based on a series of misconceptions. The central executive is not an organ that might or might not exist, but a scientific concept. Part of its function is to separate the analysis of executive processes from the question of their anatomical location. Like other components of working memory, it is fractionable into subsystems. How the subsystems interrelate and how they map onto the anatomical substrate are empirical questions under active current investigation. (JINS, 1998, 4, 523–526.)

Patients with frontal lobe meningioma may present to psychiatric services. Clinical diagnostic sensitivity, particularly in the absence of neurological signs, remains central to diagnosis.