Abstract
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.
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Notes
Presentation timing was determined by screen refresh rates. The values presented were converted from screen refresh rates (or ticks) to the milliseconds.
The longer trial presentation time compared to earlier versions of the SART was used to accommodate the mask and response cue.
DMDX display software, The University of Arizona.
CFQ-for-other scores were unavailable for three control participants and two TBI patients.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those from the National Rehabilitation Hospital, Dún Laoghaire, who participated in this research. The Government of Ireland’s Higher Education Authority supported this research. This work was supported by a grant from the Irish Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions (8AA. G03007) to Professor Ian Robertson
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Dockree, P.M., Bellgrove, M.A., O’Keeffe, F.M. et al. Sustained attention in traumatic brain injury (tbi) and healthy controls: enhanced sensitivity with dual-task load. Exp Brain Res 168, 218–229 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-0079-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-0079-x