Interdependence of Priming Performance and Brain-Damage

Abstract

Basically, two hospitalized patient groups were given a variety of different learning situations which are subdi-vidable into conventional and experimental tests and which covered so-called implicit and explicit memory tests. Furthermore, data from other cases were used for comparison and for support of the proposed hypotheses. The main sample consisted of IS focal brain-damaged patients (group N) and 15 patients after surgical interventions outside the nervous system (group O). Aside from affective behavior and intelligence, memory tests were used. These included the WMS-r, picture and face recognition tests, the Tower of Hanoi, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), a Concept Comprehension Test, and word and picture priming tests. A number of significant differences were obtained between the two age, sex, and education matched groups. Above all, intelligence and memory were reduced in parallel in the cortically damaged compared to the well-matched orthopedic group, while attention and concentration did not differ. Even performance in tests such as the Tower of Hanoi and the WCST differed, perhaps explainable by the proportion of frontal lobe damaged patients and the overall decrease in intelligence in group N. Verbal priming was found to a similar degree in both groups. On the other hand, priming of incomplete pictures was significantly poorer in group N than in group O; furthermore, results from MQ- and IQ-based group splitting (independent of their previous N or O affiliations) suggested a direct relation between mnemonic and other cognitive abilities and success in priming. As perceptual, but not verbal priming differed between groups, an explanation of group N results, based primarily on explicit memory processing, is unlikely. It is concluded that non-brain damaged patients in general are able to use a wider repertoire of information encoding strategies which at least in part is memory and intelligence correlated.