title: Visual selective attention after severe closed head injury.
abstract: This study investigated the nature of selective attention deficits after severe closed head injury (CHI). Twenty participants with severe CHI (greater than 1 year postinjury) and 20 matched controls completed search and nonsearch visual selective attention tasks under conditions of low (Experiment 1) and high (Experiment 2) target-distractor similarity. In the search situations, participants searched visual displays that contained 1, 4, or 8 items for the targets. In the nonsearch situations, the location of the targets was visually cued with a peripheral arrow. The results revealed that in both the low and high target-distractor similarity search conditions. CHI participants required a longer time than controls to locate and identify the target. In contrast, in the nonsearch condition, CHI participants were able to successfully ignore irrelevant task information when target-distractor similarity was low. However, when target-distractor similarity was high, CHI participants had more difficulty than controls ignoring the irrelevant information. These results suggest that, in comparison to controls, CHI participants may be at a disadvantage in selective attention situations when visual search is required and when the discriminability between targets and distractors is difficult.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Washington State University, Pullman 99164-4820, USA. schmitter-e@wsu.edu
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schmitter-Edgecombe
authors.forename: M K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Kibby
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D016489:Head Injuries, Closed / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*