Subjective organization and positive transfer of performance with traumatically brain-injured adults

Two experiments compared the subjective organization of memory in college students and persons with brain injury using a part-whole list-learning task. Previous research attributed the negative transfer of learning that college students experience in the part-whole task to their inability to reorganize part-list words when learning the whole list. We reasoned that persons with brain injury would not experience negative transfer of learning in the part-whole paradigm because of their limited organizational skills. Experiment 1 replicated the usual negative transfer of learning with college students. Experiment 2 showed that brain-injured participants did not experience the same negative transfer of learning effects during the same task.