Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
1-2
pubmed:dateCreated
2005-12-12
pubmed:abstractText
Poor sustained attention or alertness is a common consequence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and has a considerable impact on the recovery and adjustment of TBI patients. Here, we describe the development of a sensitive laboratory task in healthy subjects (Experiment 1) and its enhanced sensitivity to sustained attention errors in TBI patients (Experiment 2). The task involves withholding a key press to an infrequent no-go target embedded within a predictable sequence of numbers (primary goal) and detecting grey-coloured targets within the sequence (secondary goal). In Experiment 1, we report that neurologically healthy subjects are more likely to experience a lapse of attention and neglect the primary task goal, despite ceiling performance on the secondary task. Further, attentional lapses on the task correlated with everyday attentional failures and variability of response time. In Experiment 2, the task discriminates between TBI patients and controls with a large effect size. The dual-task yields more errors in both groups than a simple task involving only the primary goal that is commonly used to detect sustained attention deficits in neurologically impaired groups. TBI patients' errors also correlated with everyday cognitive failures and variability of response time. This was not the case in the simple version of the task. We conclude that the dual-task demand associated with this task enhances its sensitivity as a measure of sustained attention in TBI patients and neurologically healthy controls that relates to everyday slips of attention.
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:month
Jan
pubmed:issn
0014-4819
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:volume
168
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
218-29
pubmed:dateRevised
2009-11-11
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
2006
pubmed:articleTitle
Sustained attention in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and healthy controls: enhanced sensitivity with dual-task load.
pubmed:affiliation
Department of Psychology & Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, 2, Ireland. dockreep@tcd.ie
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article, Comparative Study, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't