The effects of strategy training on acquisition of new verbal information in patients with acquired brain lesions

Abstract

We read with great interest the recent paper published by Aragon et al. [1] in NeuroRehabilitation. In their study, participants were required to remember the last word of a series of sentences with target words presented in a self-generated or provided condition. The authors demonstrated that self-generation techniques aimed at improving learning and memory benefitted patients with traumatic brain injury and healthy subjects in terms of number of words recalled. They also suggested that further research into the effects of rehabilitation programs designed to improve memory including such techniques was warranted. We have recently demonstrated evidence of this hypothesis in patients with acquired brain injury [2]. The brain correlates of strategy memory training were investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neuropsychological tests. Patients with acquired brain lesions in the prefrontal cortex including the dorsolateral and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex were evaluated before and after semantic strategy training using a word list-encoding paradigm. The strategy training consisted of generating and remembering words according to their common features or categories. After training, subjects were instructed to remember and