Paradoxical facilitation of a free recall of nonwords in persons with traumatic brain injury

Brain damage is usually associated with behavioral deficits. However, there is an increasing amount of evidence that lesions of some brain regions are associated with improvements instead of impairments of certain behaviors. We report the results of a study of free recall performance in subjects wit h traumatic brain injury. One-fourth of the subjects displayed above-normal performance in recall of nonwords. No such facilitation was found with nin e lists of words, (C) 1999 Academic Press.