Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T02:38:33.527Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Mapping High vs. Low Planning Knowledge in Survivors of Brain Injury

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2015

Connie Shears*
Affiliation:
Chapman University, Orange, California, USA
Mary Gauvain
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside, California, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Connie Shears PhD, Associate Professor, Psychology Department, Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

Distinguishing the comprehension of goal-directed actions from the enactment of those actions is the mental stage of planning, which we identify as planning knowledge. This distinction allows rehabilitation efforts to utilise reading comprehension of a fictional character's plans as a possible cognitive retraining tool. Hypothesising that comprehension of physical cause and effect is relatively intact in brain injury survivors, we compared survivors with high vs. low scores on the errand-planning task for comprehension of inferences based on physical cause and effect versus planning knowledge domains. Results indicate that those survivors with high errand-planning scores formed inferences from both knowledge domains, while survivors with low errand-planning scores were unable to form knowledge-based inferences. These findings suggest that a rehabilitation focus on comprehension of actions towards a goal state may retrain survivors’ skill at the mental stage of planning.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Driver, J., Haggard, P., & Shallice, T. (Eds.) (2008). Mental processes in the human brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hayes-Roth, B., & Hayes-Roth, F. (1979). A cognitive model of planning. Cognitive Science, 3, 275310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peach, R.K. (2013). The cognitive basis for sentence planning difficulties in discourse after traumatic brain injury. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 22, 285297.Google Scholar
Radziszewska, B., & Rogoff, B. (1988). Influence of adult and peer collaborators on children's planning skills. Developmental Psychology, 6, 840848.Google Scholar
Shears, C., & Chiarello, C. (2004). Knowledge-based inferences are not general. Discourse Processes, 38, 3155.Google Scholar
Shears, C., & Gauvain, M. (in press). Acquired brain injury results in specific impairment of planning knowledge. Brain Impairment.Google Scholar
Timmerman, M.E., & Brouwer, W.H. (1999). Slow information processing after very severe closed head injury: Impaired access to declarative knowledge and intact application and acquisition of procedural knowledge. Neuropsychologia, 37, 467478.Google Scholar
Trabasso, T., van den Broek, P., & Suh, S.Y. (1989). Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories. Discourse Processes, 12, 125.Google Scholar