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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]
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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 

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