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When actions resulting from brain injury are attributed to causes other than the injury, this misattribution hinders accurate diagnosis and treatment. Data on effects of injury and individual levels of pre-morbid behaviours lead to accurate attributions.

Thirteen non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were compared with age matched controls on two standard tests of implicit learning. A verbal version of the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task was used to assess sequence learning and an artificial grammar (AG) task assessed perceptual learning. It was predicted that PD patients would show implicit learning on the AG task but not the SRT task, as motor sequence learning is thought to be reliant upon the basal ganglia which is damaged in PD. Patients with PD demonstrated implicit learning on both tasks. In light of these unexpected results the research on SRT learning in PD is reconsidered, and some possible explanations for the sometimes conflicting results of PD patient samples on the SRT task are considered. Factors which merit further study in this regard are: The degree to which the SRT task relies on overt motor responses; the effects of frontal lobe dysfunction upon implicit sequence learning; and the degree to which the illness itself has advanced.

Visible markers of injury such as scars are spurious indicators of severity but they shape judgements of severity and attributions for actions of persons with brain injury. These results inform more accurate diagnosis and treatment for actions resulting from brain injury.

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