Relationships between performance on categorization tests and daily tasks in post-stroke and healthy individuals

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of categorization abilities for everyday functioning. The specific research objectives were to investigate the performance of post-stroke and healthy subjects on categorization tests, and examine their relationship to everyday tasks which require categorization abilities. A study with 33 subjects was conducted: 18 cerebrovascular accident (CVA) subjects, of which eight were right CVA (RVCA) and 10 left CVA (LCVA) patients. As the performance of those two subgroups did not reveal significance, the subgroups were combined for further analyses. Fifteen healthy subjects were included as control subjects. Subjects were evaluated on five different categorization tests and three different daily tasks which require categorization abilities. All evaluations were video-taped. The findings suggest that post-stroke patients evidence reduced abilities to sort into categories and shift from one category to another. Significant differences between performance of patients and healthy subjects on both tests and tasks were also found. Spearman correlations between tests scores and task scores show low to moderate relationships, which may suggest that tests scores may not explain the full task performance capacity. Clinical implications and recommendations for further research are discussed.