Serial pattern learning after mild head injury

Non-verbal serial pattern learning in patients with mild brain injury was examined using a serial pattern-learning task introduced by Nissen and her colleagues. The task involves two types of pattern cycles: Simple and Complex. Each pattern cycle consists of eight acquisition trials followed by a final generation phase, i.e. the ninth trial. The subjects responded to the asterisks appearing in repetitions of a 10-element spatial sequence in each pattern cycle. Eighty subjects were taken, of which 40 subjects had mild head injury and 40 were uninjured. Prior research with this task has shown that individuals show intact performance on the indirect measure of pattern learning, but are impaired on the direct measure. The results of this study showed that mild brain injury does cause a marked disruption in the ability to learn and remember serial pattern information in both simple and complex patterns.