title: Verbal selective learning after traumatic brain injury in children.
abstract: Selective learning (SL), the ability to select items to learn from among other items, engages cognitive control, which is purportedly mediated by the frontal cortex and its circuitry. Using incentive-based auditory word recall and expository discourse tasks, we studied the efficiency of SL in children ages 6 to 16 years who had sustained severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) at least 1 year earlier. We hypothesized that SL would be compromised by severe TBI. Results indicated that children with severe TBI performed significantly worse than age-matched typically developing children on word- and discourse-level measures of SL efficiency with no significant group differences in number of items recalled from auditory word lists or declarative facts. We conclude that severe TBI disrupts incentive-based cognitive control processes, possibly due to involvement of frontal neural networks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA. ghanten@bcm.tmc.edu
authors.forename: Gerri
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hanten
authors.forename: Sandra B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Chapman
authors.forename: Jacquelyn F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Gamino
authors.forename: Lifang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Shelley Black
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Benton
authors.forename: Garland
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Stallings-Roberson
authors.forename: Jill V
authors.initials: JV
authors.lastname: Hunter
authors.forename: Harvey S
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Levin
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D000293:Adolescent; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D012057:Reinforcement, Verbal