Organizational strategy influence on visual memory performance after stroke: Cortical/subcortical and left/right hemisphere contrasts

Objective: To examine how organizational strategy at encoding influences vi sual memory performance in stroke patients. Design: Case control study. Setting: Postacute rehabilitation hospital. Participants: Stroke patients with right hemisphere damage (n = 20) versus left hemisphere damage (n = 15), and stroke patients with cortical damage ( n = 11) versus subcortical damage (n = 19). Main Outcome Measures: Organizational strategy scores, recall performance o n the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF). Results: Results demonstrated significantly greater organizational impairme nt and less accurate copy performance tie, encoding of visuospatial informa tion on the ROCF) in the right compared to the left hemisphere group, and i n the cortical relative to the subcortical group. Organizational strategy a nd copy accuracy scores were significantly related to each other. The absol ute amount of immediate and delayed recall was significantly associated wit h poor organizational strategy scores. However, relative to the amount of v isual information originally encoded, memory performances did not differ be tween groups. Conclusions: These findings suggest that visual memory impairments after st roke may be caused by a lack of organizational strategy affecting informati on encoding, rather than an impairment in memory storage or retrieval.