Organization and recall of visual information after traumatic brain injury

Subjective organization (SO) is the ability to structure information to help facilitate storage and retrieval. There is a paucity of research concerning how a person subjectively organizes visual information.

This study investigates whether traumatic brain injury (TBI) hinders the ability to subjectively organize and recall visual symbols. The authors use an Association Rule Modeling (ARM) procedure to measure SO and explore whether the complexity of the rules generated from the ARM predicted recall of symbols.

Twenty-two collegiate athletes with self-reported, repetitive, mild TBI and 22 college students without TBI participated. All participants completed a list learning task that assessed their free recall of unfamiliar symbols. ARM revealed the associative structure among the symbols in the list for each participant.

Results showed that collegiate athletes with repetitive, mild TBI develop significantly fewer association rules for visual stimuli compared to college students without TBI. Furthermore, collegiate athletes with TBI produce fewer complex SO rules for the visual stimuli relative to college students without TBI.

Brain injury diminishes a person's ability to subjectively organize novel visual information. ARM is a sensitive clinical measure of SO for patients with TBI.