This article describes and evaluates a new technique for teaching students to interpret studies of patients with brain injuries. This technique asks students to consider how knives and blenders lose specific functionality when they are damaged. This approach better prepares students to make proper inferences from behavioral deficits observed after brain injury, specifically with reference to single and double dissociation. Significantly improved performance on multiple-choice and identification questions included in midterm examinations suggests that the impact of these thought experiments was substantive and long lasting.
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