Impaired avoidance learning after closed-head injury: dissociation between two tasks due to classical conditioning

Positive supports for people who experience behavioral and cognitive disability after brain injury: a review

BACKGROUND

Behavioral and cognitive problems are among the most common and troubling consequences of traumatic brain injury. Furthermore, behavioral and cognitive challenges typically interact in complex ways, necessitating an integrated approach to intervention and support.

OBJECTIVES

This article reviews literature on behavioral outcome in children and adults with traumatic brain injury, traditional approaches to behavioral intervention and cognitive rehabilitation, and the history, principles, and assessment and treatment procedures associated with context-sensitive, support-oriented approaches to behavioral and cognitive intervention. We propose a clinical framework that integrates cognitive and behavioral intervention themes.

Avoidance learning in schizophrenia: a dissociation between the effects of aversive and non-aversive stimuli

Patients with schizophrenia did not take significantly more trials than normal controls to learn to use a visual warning signal to avoid a non-aversive stimulus on a simple computer-administered avoidance learning task. When the stimulus to be avoided was aversive (i.e., a loud buzzer), however, the schizophrenic group could be divided into two subgroups based upon their performance; almost one half of the schizophrenic group failed to learn how to avoid this task successfully. The other half, like the normal controls and the closed head injury group in our previous studies, benefited from the aversiveness of the stimulus to be avoided, and learned to avoid more quickly than in the non-aversive condition. A post-hoc analysis of the differences between these two subgroups of the patients suggested that the discrepancy in learning was related to the age of onset of illness.