Brain injury and movement recall: Preselection, active-passive and interference effects

Stroke patients with unilateral lesions were compared with age-controls and students on their ability to reproduce a terminal location established kinesthetically by a previous movement. Conditions for the criterion movement differed over active/passive and preselected/constrained (experiment 1) and whether the retention interval between the criterion and recall movements involved mental rehearsal of the criterion movement or yes/no responding to a mental arithmetic task (experiment 2). Whereas students showed more accurate recall with little effect of criterion movement condition, patient groups showed a preselection effect, but only with active movements. A preferred hand advantage observed for the patient controls did not occur with stroke patients, and prevention of mental rehearsal during the retention interval disrupted recall more for the stroke patients. These findings are interpreted in terms of hemisphere-specific coding strategies whose relative use depends on the attentional demands of the task.