Introduction: The Brixton Spatial Anticipation Test is a widely used neuropsychological test, thought to assess executive functions and to be sensitive to frontal lobe lesions. Our aim was to investigate Brixton performance in patients with focal frontal or posterior lesions and healthy controls.

Method: We compared performance on the Brixton in a sample of 24 frontal patients, 18 posterior patients and 22 healthy controls. Both overall performance (total number of errors) and error types were analyzed.

Results: We found no significant differences between frontal and posterior patients and healthy controls in overall Brixton performance. Moreover, our error analysis showed no difference between frontal patients, posterior patients and healthy controls. The only exception was that posterior patients had a greater tendency to guess and make more errors when following specific rules than healthy controls but this was no longer significant once fluid intelligence was controlled for. We also found no significant difference between the performance of patients with left lateral (n = 11), right lateral (n = 10) or superior medial (n = 18) frontal lesions and healthy controls.

Conclusions: The Brixton test is not sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction. It is likely that the test draws on a range of cognitive abilities not specific to frontal lobe lesions. Hence, caution should be taken when drawing conclusions about its neural substrates.

简介：Brixton空间预期测试是一种广泛使用的神经心理学测试，旨在评估执行功能并对额叶病变敏感。我们的目的是研究Brixton在额部或后部局灶性病变和健康对照患者中的表现。

方法：我们比较了24名额叶患者，18名后牙患者和22名健康对照者在Brixton上的表现。分析了总体性能（错误总数）和错误类型。

结果：我们发现正面和背面患者与健康对照组的整体Brixton表现无显着差异。此外，我们的误差分析显示额叶患者，后部患者和健康对照之间没有差异。唯一的例外是，与健康对照相比，遵循特定规则时后方患者更有可能猜测和犯下更多错误，但一旦控制了液体智力，这不再重要。我们还发现左侧外侧（n = 11），右侧（n = 10）或内侧上（n = 18）额叶病变的患者与健康对照组的表现之间无显着差异。

结论：Brixton测试对额叶功能障碍不敏感。该测试很可能会利用一系列并非特定于额叶病变的认知能力。因此，在得出有关其神经基质的结论时应谨慎。