Subjective organization of verbal memory and learning in adolescents with brain damage

Subjective organization (SO) of verbal memory and learning was investigated for 44 adolescent neurological patients, who were subdivided into four clinical groups by localization of lesion as follows: right hemisphere (RH), left hemisphere (LH), frontal (FL), and brain stem (BS). As expected, patients with RH lesions performed best on a verbal learning task, whereas patients with FL and BS lesions demonstrated very poor SO, suggesting a failure in categorizing memory input. Patients with LH lesions increased SO following successive trials, suggesting an active learning strategy. It is argued that SO analysis,in neuropsychology appears to be a particularly heuristic direction of further research in order to establish a better understanding of memory and learning impairments of patients with brain damage.