The Covert Orienting of Visual Attention Following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Attentional problems have frequently been identi®ed following traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) using both clinical assessments and self-report measures. Unfortunately, most measures of attention do not enable us to determine the underlying basis of these attentional de®cits. One exception is Posner's Covert Orienting of Attention Task (COAT), which is designed to identify some of the fundamental mental operations underlying attention. This study sought to determine whether the COAT task could identify discrete attentional de®cits following TBI beyond those caused by reduced speed of information processing. Thirty ®ve patients who had sustained a severe TBI were compared to 35 age-matched controls. Results revealed that, although the reaction times of the patients with TBI were signi®cantly slower than the controls, there were no differences between the two groups in terms of their ability to disengage, move, and engage their attention. The introduction of a secondary (language) task produced no signi®cant difference between the two groups on the COAT task. However, there was a signi®cant difference between the two groups on the language-based task, suggesting a de®cit in auditory-verbal attention under dual task conditions.

Mild traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder: Investigation of visual attention in Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom veterans

“…These trends are consistent with other studies showing attentional deficits with PTSD [20][21][25][26]. Consistent with prior studies [6,[9][10], attentional performance was substantially slower and less accurate for mTBI+PTSD participants than for the other participant groups (Figure 2). We also observed substantial individual differences in performance across participants in the mTBI+PTSD group.…”

“…In general, studies of the effects of TBI on attentional function do not present an entirely consistent pattern of attentional deficits, but more often than not, TBI patients perform slower on behavioral tasks [6,[10][11]. Additionally but less uniformly, TBI patients sometimes show deficits in selective/focused attention (executive function) depending on the specific task used [10,[18][19], attentional vigilance (alerting function) with tasks that require sustained attention [8,11], and shifting spatial attention (orienting function) [7,[9][10]13].…”

“…Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use an objective behavioral measure of attention to investigate attentional performance in veterans with mTBI and PTSD. Many studies have investigated attentional performance deficits in patients with TBI [6][7][8][9][10][11]. But arriving at a general conclusion regarding the effects of TBI on attentional function is difficult because these studies have used patients with different degrees of TBI (mild to severe) and injuries of different recency (days to years old).…”

Predicting Success: Patterns of Cortical Activation and Deactivation Prior to Response Inhibition

“…However, exogenous cueing of attention typically results in improvements to performance, which indicate patients are within ''normal'' limits (Bate, Mathias, & Crawford, 2001a;Whyte, Fleming, Polansky, Cavallucci, & Coslett, 1997). This pattern of performance suggests that while the underlying attentional system is intact, the ability to maintain appropriate distribution of attentional resources may be impaired.…”

Methylphenidate effect on hemispheric attentional imbalance in patients with traumatic brain injury: A psychophysical study

“…Thus, subjects would have performed best if they had neglected the precue altogether. Nevertheless, as is well known, subjects tend to attend automatically to a precue and perform better on same-side trials than on cross-hemifield trials [15,65,66,68].…”