Using association rules to measure Subjective Organization after Acquired Brain Injury

Subjective Organization (SO) refers to the human tendency to impose organization on our environment. Persons with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) often lose the ability to organize however, there are no performance based measures of organization that can be used to document this disability.

The authors propose a method of association rule analysis (AR) that can be used as a clinical tool for assessing a patient's ability to organize.

Twenty three patients with ABI recalled a list of twelve unrelated nouns over twelve study and test trials. Several measures of AR computed on these data were correlated with various measures of short-term, long-term, and delayed recall of the words.

All of the AR measures correlated significantly with the short-term and long-term memory measures. The confidence measure was the best predictor of memory and the number of association rules generated was the best predictor of learning.

The confidence measure can be used as a clinical tool to assess SO with individual ABI survivors.