Browsing by Subject "skeematyyppi"

Goals. Event schema, also known as a script, contains information about a structure of a particular event; about the sequences of events and their temporal order. With the information the scripts contain, one can anticipate and plan for future events and actions. People with traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have difficulties in the verbal planning of actions. Previous international research has shown that the scripts produced by people with TBI contain fewer actions central to the schema, than scripts produced by healthy control subjects. The aim of this study is to examine what kind of scripts Finnish speaking subjects with TBI and their healthy control subject counterparts generate in a script generation task consisting of eight scripts. This study also examines whether the script type has influence on the features of the generated scripts. Methods. Fifteen subjects with TBI and fifteen healthy control subjects participated in the study. The researcher collected the research material during the spring and summer 2015. The research material consisted of the scripts generated by the subjects and control subjects, as well as the results of the control tasks (Boston Naming Test, Rapid Automatized Naming Test, semantic and phonemic fluencies). The subjects were asked to generate event schemas for eight everyday tasks belonging to four schema categories. The categories were 'open high frequency' (go shopping, go for a walk), 'open low frequency' (apply for a job, go on a vacation), 'closed high frequency' (make coffee, brush teeth), and 'closed low frequency' (go to a doctor, go to a restaurant). Closed scripts are related to events where the actions involved in their execution are well established and tightly related to each other. Open scripts are less structured and have loose connections between the actions involved. High and low frequency scripts differ on how frequent the event is. Time given for generating each script was 60 seconds. The scripts were scored for the total number of events produced, the number of event repetitions, the informativeness of the script, and the meaningfulness and the centrality of the events. The results of the qualitative analysis were displayed in a statistical form and analyzed with the non-parametrical Mann-Whitney U -test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that the scripts produced by the subjects with TBI were less informative and contained less actions than the scripts produced by the healthy control subjects, regardless of the script type. Closed scripts were found to be more informative than open scripts, and the subjects produced more actions to the closed than to the open scripts. When the high and low frequency scripts generated by the subjects with TBI were examined, no significant difference was found between the two script types. The results of this study can be explained by the disturbances in executive functions, and disturbances in the working memory as well as the episodic memory, all of which can affect the subject's ability to produce a coherent story and recall actions belonging to a certain event.